I am sad that I cannot sell electronics by auction anymore because of sport bidders with (0)-feedback accounts bidding on my auctions.
When I first got on E-bay in the late 90s, I remember people being very concerned about getting a complaint, even people who were not strict rule-followers by nature. That last thing you wanted was negative feedback that would make people reluctant to bid on your future auctions.
In the late 90s I got rid of stuff on E-Bay, sometimes with the name "junky" in the auction title. I would start he auctions at $0.99 because that incurred a lower insertion fee and because I didn't know what it was worth. To me it was junk; I would feel back charging anything at all. But through, E-Bay I could find someone somewhere in the world who wanted my junk. I would contact them by email when they won. A week later I would get a postal money order. I would take the money order to the post office and cash it before dropping the box in the mail, just to be sure it wasn't a fake money order. It never was.
E-Bay allowed me to afford things I couldn't buy otherwise. I would buy box sets of TV shows, watch them, and then sell them for almost the amount I paid. I bought ham radio equipment the same prices I would have paid at a hamfest (radio and electronics convention), and when I wanted to try something different, I could easily sell it, without the hassle of haggling at a hamfest tailgate.
When my wife and I got married in the 00s, we put all her junk from her apartment on E-Bay, including old dolls that were now collectibles. We put the money toward a down payment on a house.
Since then I've sold very intermittently, when I had some old electronics, the type of stuff I might have sold at a hamfest or garage sale. I had a few people who changed their mind and didn't want to pay. I told them to buy it, pay me a small fee of my choosing, and I would leave positive feedback. Otherwise I would report them as non-paying. No one wanted that option.
Starting about five years ago, I started having a problem with sport bidders. It wasn't the old problem where a kid bid and the parent didn't want to pay. This was just a bunch of people with (0) feedback and accounts created within the past few days bidding up my auctions with no other communication. People here say you just have to do a fixed-price listing that requires payment to close the listing. Why doesn't E-Bay require payment when you bid, sort of like Kickstarter? If the buyer does not win, E-Bay would refund the money to your card.
This morning I lamented to my wife that we can't sell our junk on E-Bay auctions anymore. She said that was 20 years ago. She said imagine if you had asked us in the 00s what the early 80s were like. It was long ago, when cable was new and people watched MTV. Now the 00s are long ago, when E-Bay had effective auctions. Maybe the era has passed. Want ads --> E-bay --> Craigslist --> FB Marketplace --> whatever the youngs are using now. E-Bay still feels like an exciting new technology, but it just is not.
The world is better now. I don't want to go back to the 90s. I would like to put my old junk up for auction, and have this amazing website keep track of our reputations so we can trust each other to mail a check. But it's gone. Maybe there's something on a centralized blockchain that I don't know about yet. I try to keep up. I don't want to be like my parents who were confused how I was doing a garage sale on that www-thingy. I can work to prevent that. But I can't do anything about the fact that E-Bay as an auction site for electronics is gone.
