Shill bids on ebay

Herongull

Some second chance offers arise from shill bidding, others arise from bad buyers reneging (and the seller is blameless), while others arise from the seller selling multiple identical items (perfectly reasonable in my opinion).

The first situation means the seller is dishonest (and a crook because shilling is fraud under UK law), so should be avoided by sensible buyers not wanting to encourage this criminal practice.

The second situation is difficult because a) it is often not possible for the buyer to distinguish it from the first and b) even if the seller is blameless, the auction bidding has still been completely messed up by the dud buyer. The whole point about fair auctions is that the highest bidder wins and usually pays less than the price he was prepared to buy (unless the winning bid happens to equal this).

Fair auctions are a win-win because the seller gets the best price for the item (as auctions are a competition between buyers) and the buyer usually gets it for a little less than his maximum. With a dud buyer who drops out, the second highest bid is always at this buyers maximum rather than the lower price he would have got it at if the dud buyer was absent.

At best this is an unfair auction (because it has been spoilt by the dud buyer even though the seller is blameless), and the buyer should refuse the second chance offer (unless he is really keen to buy or the seller offers it to him at a lower price than his maximum bid) and wait for another (fair) auction to come up when he is likely to pay a lower price.

If the second price offer is not accepted, the seller can always re-auction the item. No buyer should have any concerns about refusing a second chance offer, but should not accuse the seller of shilling because it could easily be due to a dud buyer. You need to look for additional evidence (as I did) if you intend to report potential shilling to ebay.

As dud buyers and shill selling become more common, other buyers will become reluctant to bid up to their maximum using the above logic. Hence the dud bidders and shill sellers end up ruining auctions for everyone.

porto_bello

I noticed an interesting feedback pattern this morning. A bidder on almost 500 items, with a 70% correlation with just one seller. Then I looked at feedback records here, and found a similarly skewed correlation:

http://toolhaus.org/cgi-bin/mutual?UserA=antp60&UserB=flyinggt750kettle&Item=&Check=Check&Limit=9999

I'm sure some will say it's paranoia to suggest that the trail of 550 feedbacks against the same seller is nothing other than confirmation that they and the buyer are simply specialists in the same category, namely:

Die cast model vehicles...

And Space 1999/Doctor Who annuals
And Airfix kits
And DVDs
And golly badges
And cigarette cards
And Pelham puppets
And Star Wars jigsaws
And James Bond collectables
And Eagle/2000AD comics
And Micro Machines...

shaun_from_Africa

Strapped wrote: »

Normally they don't agree because they have made you the offer based on a price you were happy to pay and they were happy to accept* but instead you try to screw them over.

How can it be an attempt to screw someone over?
If a prospective buyer offers a price which was lower than their high bid, it is simply that, an offer, and is no more an attempt at screwing the seller over than haggling down the price in a shop or car boot sale.

If the seller feels the price offered is too low then they don't have to accept it.

Strapped

shaun_from_Africa wrote: »

How can it be an attempt to screw someone over?
If a prospective buyer offers a price which was lower than their high bid, it is simply that, an offer, and is no more an attempt at screwing the seller over than haggling down the price in a shop or car boot sale.

If the seller feels the price offered is too low then they don't have to accept it.

Too right they don't. But this was in response to the other poster's assertion that if a seller refuses, they are guilty of shill bidding! :eek:

RHemmings

I personally would be fine with a second chance offer when the original sale completed and a seller was offering me another of the same item.

However, I wouldn't be happy about a SCO where the offer was off a single item that the winning bidder hadn't paid for. Whether or not the lack of sale was the bidder's (NPB) or seller's (shill) fault, the auction has been queered by the bid and failed sale, and I wouldn't want to go ahead with it. I wouldn't be blaming the seller or assuming that the seller was a shill, unless there was further evidence of that.

Personally I think that the "fair" price for an auction where a bidder doesn't pay or retracts a bid is the price the auction would have achieved if that bidder hadn't been involved at all. But nobody can know what that was. You could simply remove all that bidder's bids from the equation and see what the price drops to. But, there may have been other potential bidders who would have bid had the price not risen. So in this case I wouldn't accept a second-chance offer as for me personally it's not just the price and the product, I want to feel that the auction has progressed in a fair fashion. For a SCO, I wouldn't be confident of this and would prefer to buy the item another time. Even if it's at a higher price.

This is very different from the case where the seller has multiple items as then we know what the fair market price is, and the seller is effectively making SCOs at a discount if they are at the second place bidder's max bid.

So when I receive a SCO, my reaction depends entirely on what the reasons are for the SCO.

bris

Shill bidding is rife on Ebay, although the the Ebay regulars on here won't admit it's as big a problem as it is.

I have been shill bid on a few occasions and have only found out how to spot it in the last year or so.

Ebay don't do enough to stop it, despite them supposedly having a complex system in place to prevent it.

I also agree with okydoky25, why should you agree to pay for a second chance at your highest bid when the winning bidder had no intention of paying for the item. They shouldn't have been bidding in the first place, meaning you could have won it much cheaper.

porto_bello

bris wrote: »

Shill bidding is rife on Ebay, although the the Ebay regulars on here won't admit it's as big a problem as it is.

I have to agree - I went through the formality of reporting my observations of a few posts back to eBay. No argument from the representative this time - transparently clear correlation between a buyer and seller across a multitude of categories ... join the dots!

bris wrote: »

Ebay don't do enough to stop it, despite them supposedly having a complex system in place to prevent it.

Quite right - what has eBay actually done? Pursued a single court case, which only got going because of other issues that were drawn to the attention of Trading Standards.

bris wrote: »

I also agree with okydoky25, why should you agree to pay for a second chance at your highest bid when the winning bidder had no intention of paying for the item. They shouldn't have been bidding in the first place, meaning you could have won it much cheaper.

I never accept second chance offers. Whether the winner was genuine or not, with them out of the running and all things being equal, the price next time around should be lower - so why pay over the odds?

jetplane

bris wrote: »

Shill bidding is rife on Ebay, although the the Ebay regulars on here won't admit it's as big a problem as it is.

I have been shill bid on a few occasions and have only found out how to spot it in the last year or so.

I look at the % of bids the bidder has with this seller along with the number of bid retractions, should I be taking a closer look and are there other clues? Rightly or wrongly I also get suspicious when I bid late in an auction where there has been no interest and suddenly there's another bidder.
Thanks

s1lv3rdal5

Ebay has had its day, now it is more like amazon.

There are too many shill bidders and other issues with ebay.

My feedback is over1,700 mainly buying over a long time, but I have GIVEN UP on ebay and rarely logon, it is just not worth the hassle.

Now I prefer to have the security that buying new brings, and it is not much more expensive that ebay.

soolin

jetplane wrote: »

I look at the % of bids the bidder has with this seller along with the number of bid retractions, should I be taking a closer look and are there other clues? Rightly or wrongly I also get suspicious when I bid late in an auction where there has been no interest and suddenly there's another bidder.
Thanks

I suggest you might want to familiarise yourself with bidding patterns and snipe bids. Yiou do realise that most people bid in the closing minutes and often use snipes...don't you :eek: