Newbie bidding on my item

purplepatch

Hi, am usually solely an ebay buyer - only ever sold a few quite low price items, but currently have a camcorder listed for sale - usually they reach the £80/90 mark.

Still 3 days to go, but today have a 0% feedback person (registered in UK a few days ago) on the highest bid at the moment. Fair enough I thought, we all had to start somewhere, but when I checked out their bidding, they are bidding on 6 different high price items including cameras and laptops. Am I right to be suspicious?

I now feel quite uncomfortable and am considering rejecting their bid but not sure what options I have? I haven't said anything in my listing about not accepting bids from newbies.

soolin

Personally I would email the bidder and sort of introduce yourself mentioning that you can see they are new and wondered if they require any further information about your selling term, payment methods etc. Also ask that if they are intending to pay by paypal have they got their account running and confirmed?

I know it is a nonsense email but depending on the sort of response you get you can then decide whether or not to pull the bid. I rarely worry about newbies, all my problems have been with users that have feedback in the teens..but if they are only bidding on high price items it might be a concern.

Soo

smartie1976

On higher value items, in my ramblings at the bottom, I ask bidders with less than 5 pos to contact me prior to bidding.

This allows me to find out if they are genuine, and also to check they've read ALL the auction.
Invariably most don't and if I feel they're suspicious I use this as my get-out clause to cancel their bid.

I cancelled one the other day, and I got a message from them saying:
"Why did you block me from bidding. Do i owe you money or something?"
which seemed a bit of an odd thing for someone to write.

I replied stating they had not followed my T&C by contacting me first.
Ironically, in the end they would have been outbid anyway.

purplepatch

Thanks for the replies. Soo, I have taken your advice and emailed them but I do suspect as smartie says that they will get outbid anyway - the max they have bid is high fifties on camcorders and with 17 watchers (is that good??) and 3 days left, I'm hoping for quite a bit more. [fingers crossed!]