Fake number of sold

[sellwithtrust]

Disclaimer: I am selling the same item.

Story:

I found two other competitive seller selling the same item. They are using the same "3rd account buyer" to buy many "1" order on the same days and it has been happening for months. Their # sold get boosted up to 1300 in 3 months and more than half of them are from the same "3rd account buyer".  

I wonder if they are violating any ebay rule, since buyers really like to choose a higher #sold listing. If the sales are fake, that creates an unfair and dishonest environment.

[inhawaii]

How are they able to fake the number sold?

[jayjaspersgarage]

If you sell yours what difference does it make?  There are large sellers who sell dozens of Dewalt cordless tools of each type.  I might sell one every four months.  If the problem is that they can sell something at a lower price then you need to either lower your price, take it off the market for a while or punt.

[sellwithtrust]

The key point is the buyers tend to buy the listing with more # of sold. It is not rare on ebay.

Imagine a list of item from seller A has 1000 sold, and seller B has 100 sold (same quality , price, expiration date) ,  it is veyr understandable what buyers tend to choose seller A.

You may be fine selling one every four months, but if the item has expiration date right?

[sellwithtrust]

I noticed that if the buyer cancels the order and sellers refund it. It doesn't affect the number of sold on purchase history.

[vfastresponse]

Finally someone opens this topic. I got the same problem. 1 of my competitor are doing this on the pic and pretty much doing this every 2 days. I am totally not cool with that. Really wanna submit a case to ebay!

[calntom]

@sellwithtrust 

I can certainly understand your point.

The bottom line is that you may be wasting your time worrying about another sellers listings.  EBay will not be the least bit interested in addressing your concerns. I would focus on what I can control rather than attempting to get eBay to react to something they don't care about, especially in these times of limited eBay support availability. 

[luckythewinner]

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@sellwithtrust wrote:

The key point is the buyers tend to buy the listing with more # of sold. It is not rare on ebay.

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I tend to buy the listing with the lowest price.

[jzznproducts]

Thats very interesting. Am I looking at those images correctly and they are all the same buyer?

[1tuna]

if there are 100 people selling the same thing I woud go with the seller that can deliver lots of them.I do not buy phones but I would feel fine  about a seller that has sold 1000 of the same model phones for 8-900

if you take a chance on a lower price then maybe its a bad deal

of couse with items at 10-20 dollars then who really cares............thats how I feel

[jayjaspersgarage]

@sellwithtrust wrote:

The key point is the buyers tend to buy the listing with more # of sold. It is not rare on ebay.

"I tend to buy the listing with the lowest price."

I tend to buy from seller NOT in the snowy northeastern part of the country.  I look for sellers less than 1000 miles away because the post office is horrible.   

On the other hand I have never had a buyer open a case.  They are all wonderful and contact me to find out when the post office will improve.

[sextons-sweet-deals]

I personally don't look to see how many of anything is sold. look at the sellers overall feedback.

Sellers who have high volume sales along with high number of negative or neutral, raises a flag. Are these sellers just catalog / middleman sellers? Are they buying pallets of return items or items that were RTV's?

I will take a seller with 100 items sold in a month with all positive feedback over a seller who has 10,000 sold in a month and 200 negative / neutral comments. Being that they sold more, their feedback percentage will not drop much. 

[krazzykats]

Drop Shipping?

I could easily add items from another eBay seller to what I am selling, then drop ship it to my customers by editing the ship to address at checkout.