Bidder 1

Flat_Eric

I have noticed when bidding on items recently on ebay that the highest bidder is shown on several items as "Bidder 1". Given the diversity of the items I have been looking at but with the same bidder name! it clearly cant be the same person so i was just wondering if this was a new feature of ebay (or perhaps one that has been around for a while but i haven't spotted) i.e. that you can choose to have your user name private and therefore just be known as bidder 1?!

pdel61

It's a recent feature (late March) of Ebay so the bidders names remain hidden, they say in order to protect people from phising attacks and bogus second chance offers.

It also makes it easy to shill bid so increasing Ebay profits.

RFW

Flat_Eric wrote: »

I have noticed when bidding on items recently on ebay that the highest bidder is shown on several items as "Bidder 1". Given the diversity of the items I have been looking at but with the same bidder name! it clearly cant be the same person so i was just wondering if this was a new feature of ebay (or perhaps one that has been around for a while but i haven't spotted) i.e. that you can choose to have your user name private and therefore just be known as bidder 1?!

All user names are now private on bidding, to all but the seller. So bidder 1, bidder 2, bidder 3 are NOT user names, although it would be funny if those user names existed.

RFW

pdel61 wrote: »

It also makes it easy to shill bid so increasing Ebay profits.

The system to stop shill bidding has been updated with these changes, from what I've seen of it, its quite good and effective too. If you click on the bid page you can get a detailed analysis of who has bid on the sellers items and how many times, without giving the user ids.

RFW

It looks like this

30-Day Summary
Total bids: 46

Items bid on: 40
Bid activity (%) with this seller: 4%
Bids to unique sellers: 14
Bids in unique categories: 12
Bid retractions: 0
Bid retractions (6 months): 0