How to identify the fake bidders?

[dm_best]

Bids compete with other buyers. Other buyers bid too high to buy, but they don't buy. Not only us, but also genuine buyers are inconvenienced by these activities. The actual price of the item also goes down. Have you faced this situation? How to avoid these situations?

[soh.maryl]

There is no way to identify the "fake bidders", whatever those are.

You do know what to do if/when a buyer has not paid within 4 days, right?

You appear to be drop-shipping from China.  You do know that there will be thousands of other sellers offering those same items, right? 

How are "genuine buyers inconvenienced by these activities"? And how does the actual price of the item also go down?  

[ckimodog]

@dm_best 

This is the way to fix this and you will no longer be inconvenienced:

Avoid auction style listings with best offers and list all your items at a fixed buy it now price with immediate payment required checked off.  Sport bidders and non - paying bidders steer clear of these listings as they must pay instantly. No best offers either with the BIN or it will continue to inconvenience you.  

I stopped selling auction style many years ago and have never had a customer not pay me.

Good luck and Happy Selling. 

[luckythewinner]

Buyers who do not honor bids are not necessarily "fake bidders".

They may be real buyers who are unfairly taking advantage of the fact that there are no meaningful consequences for failing to honor bids. It's not right and not fair, but it is real and it does happen.

There are buyers who place multiple bids on multiple auctions, and then pay for the winning bid that results in the "best deal" and ignore the rest.

So IMHO trying to predict which specific bids by which specific users will not be honored is probably a hopeless task.

I gave up years ago except in very rare circumstances.

[simba6]

You can list as fixed price buy it now set to require payment right away.  That gets rid of most of that.

[curlys_house]

I have found that "fake bidders" will often be users who have only a few or no feedbacks and often be new users or users 6mths to a year old. If I get a bid from someone like this I usually reach out to them. If they don't respond I will remove the bid and block them. But you can't always catch them if they wait to bid until the end.

I have also found that genuine users will do this. I have had two out and out refusals to pay. One guy even laughed at me and challenged me to do something about it. I've had ebay reps tell me they don't have the ability to truly punish people who do this. We all know how things have changed so much in the buyers favor.

As has been said already, the only way to truly beat this is to stop using the auction style listing. That's fine but often times we don't really know how much to put on things. Sometimes people are willing to pay more for certain things and we all want to get great prices for the things we sell.

[fashunu4eeuh]

What you are referring to as “fake” bidders are what are usually called non-paying bidders. To mitigate the non-payers, set your Buyer Requirements at their strictest levels, which can block most serial non-payers from having access to your listings. 

Keep in mind, that new buyers or low feedback buyers are just that—new or possible guest accounts—and nothing more. No feedback history doesn't mean they are automatically suspicious and should be blocked. After all, you are a low feedback seller. Do you want to be blocked by buyers simply because you have a lack of feedback?

As others have suggested, the only sure-fire way of avoiding non-payers is to use fixed price with Immediate Payment Required.

And be sure to give the non-paying bidders on your auctions a no-pay strike by waiting the four days for payment and then canceling the sale with the reason “buyer did not pay”. Doing this will guarantee that those who have their Buyer Requirements set will benefit. For most, that means that two or more  no-pay strikes on an account will get blocked from bidding or buying from those sellers.

Good luck and wish you much future success on eBay.

[paraquip]

I was to preface my response by saying that ebay does not do enough to keep the bad buyers/bidders off of their site.   Just like there is an algorithm for non-paying bidders where you set your selling profile to block people that have XXX non-paying bidders strikes there should also a "Wiki block" function where if enough sellers block a buyer ahead of time.....they are simply punted from the site.

Under normal circumstance I sell about 200 items a week and block 1-2 buyers from every buying anything from me. 

Here are some of the trigger questions that will get you blocked:

How old to I have to be to buy?    Ebay requires buyers to be 18 under their TOS

Can you ship the package to this address (instead of the one on my account)

Can you cancel my order I never meant to buy it ( instead of using ebay cancellations)

Can you ship my item to the next town over to it's leagal for me to buy

Can we do the deal outside of ebay

At 3AM in the morning....... If I buy now can you ship my package in the next hour

If I pay now can you overnight my item? 1 feedback

I want to waive the adult signature can you do that.

I want to buy this now can you hold the items for 2 weeks until I get paid

People that make $1 offers on $200 items

People that make silly offers across most of my listings.

People that try to send me their own shipping labels

People that are abnormally aggressive in questions some like......I know your product it total junk so I'll offer you half (item is new int he box)

People that complain before buying about how they get screwed on ebay

See a pattern here? For the integrity of the platform....people like this need to shop elsewhere

With regards to manipulative bidding........

People logged in on 2 computers from the same IP address and different accounts..... one account bids low the second bids way over market and cancels bids to drive the price down

Sellers that bid on their own items to drive price up

Big ticket items where people win with zero feedback and disappear....never sell a car on ebay unless you want to sell it 4 times before a buyer shows up.

Sent offer buyers that have very low feedback and never pay.....about 80% of my sent offers never pay.

All to be sad that ebay needs to do some serious cleanup on the buyer side and simply not continue to punish its sellers

HK

[downunder-61]

The only thing I like about auction or best offer listings are the fact that you can vet your buyer.

Always check their FB left for others and their number of retractions, if you are less than happy with those things you can add the buyer to your BBL, cancel the bids and ignore the offer.

[longie_long]

This is the answer I was looking for. Kinda. 

In the vintage video games space, things have gotten crazy since the Pandemic. I see tons of listings where mysterious bidders are pushing lots to hundreds over their value. The only thing I can figure is the seller is trying to ratchet up the bids being placed on their listing by bidding from a burner account, or some dingdong is trying to nerf the bid for everyone else in hopes of catching it for cheaper at re-listing. After they refuse to pay for the lot they won at double the retail price.

Maybe I'm just cranky, though.

[linderoluxury8]

I think I have two bidders who have bid so high no one else will bid. .. I think it's one person with two accounts.  If they both pull out with just 12 hours to go I end up with nothing. What can I do?  Thanks 

[mam98031]

All buyers on Ebay are buyers.  Whether they are honest good buyers is a different question.  But they aren't fake.

If you want to ensure that your buyers pay, set your Buyer Requirements in your Site Preferences to ensure this will happen.  There is a setting towards the bottom that requires buyers to enter a payment source and ship to address BEFORE they can bid.  If they are the winner of the auction, Ebay allows them one hour to change the payment source or ship to address.  After that one hour Ebay automatically processes the payment to the seller.

[johnrj1226]

Soultion:  Don't  do auctions. 

Big price run ups don't happen as much as you think - they are just  a dream..  Buyers don't really want  stuff they "might" score,  most  items are sold at the  starting  auction price, sellers limit their potential  buyers size due to time  zone  differences, too many "game" players.  People want to buy an item now and  receive it "pronto"vs "hoping and wishing" they will get it at a cheap price.  Other than that auctions are just fine. 

This is my opinion  and am sticking to it..  Like your navel -  every one has one. - but there are innies, and outies and lint filled  or gem stone decorated ones

In our area in GA  48 miles east of Atlanta - the two  Friday  and Saturday night auctions have closed their doors several years ago - our county has  grown  from 54K  to 131K since 1996.

Your call