The eBay BUYING advice thread

ya rly

oic

One thing which you could do in future is use a snipe tool to place your bid a few seconds before an acution ends. That way the seller doesn't have sufficient time to place a bid and then retract it.

If ebay have found that he has been shill bidding then surely his account would be suspended and he'd come up 'not a rgistered user'.

It might well do shortly.

Heckofaway to lose a fairly decent amount of positive feedback rating.

Like I said - over £11?
Jona - have you still got to see this guy? That's going to be a fun meeting.

I don't really blame Ebay making the retraction process pretty rigid - it's be bloody chaos if everyone could just bid what they like and then change their minds.

the problem with ebay is the sheer volume of people going in there. i got fed up with it when i kept trying to put in (legit) bids for things only for the ebay For Your Security firewall to rebuff me every time, viz. "invalid phone number or used on too many accounts" (when i'm only using it on the one and i've tried more than one number, including landlines!). i mean, really. sort your system out so you can send a message to my mobile like everyone else does or don't bother. the end result is you get this over-paranoid overprotective keep-the-trolls-out control freakery which (a) prevents people from doing anything on ebay and (b) (as we've seen above) doesn't stop the crooks and freaks from going on there anyway and fucking up everyone else's fun/business in the process.

Jona - have you still got to see this guy? That's going to be a fun meeting.
I'm far too weak to do that; I'm just going to email him and say I'm not happy with the way it's gone and I'm not playing anymore. If anyone in the Wood Green area fancies going along and making fun of him in public, then you're welcome.

yeah i think the moral of this story is dont bid until the last minute

even if the other bidders are legit youre just pushing the price up unnecessarily

Anti-climax: the guy filled out the transaction cancellation form, I accepted. Case closed. Hope ebay throw the virtual book at him though.

I dunno, I guess they will warn him strongly about this, but let him continue.

Well, he's relisted the item already!

Hmm, what's the odds he gets no bids and then emails me asking if I'll give him £15 for it..

I bought 2 items from one seller and am happy with both but was considering only leaving feedback on one of them so that the description doesn't show up in my profile (birthday gift for other half). Is this rude?

Obviously the seller wouldn't get any extra points on their score from me doing it twice, but it's always nice to see some extra lines of glowing praise in your feedback profile...

Of course the other option is to buy 20 new things for myself on ebay so that it's no longer on the front page, heheh.

You don't have to do a feedback rightaway, you can leave it to after the event!

Can you wait until the birthday and do it then?

oops xpost

yeah, just do the feedback later. people forget to do it all the time - either the seller will contact you to remind you or just happy when you eventually do put it up.

Is there a Firefox add-on/script that you can use to exclude or ignore specific search results? I get really tired of browsing the same junk items from sellers at stupid prices for the searches I run daily, or those auctions that seem to run forever and get relisted again and again at prices nobody will ever buy them at.

i just use auction sieve. it's a client, not a browser addon, but it's indispensable

Last time I did a bunch of saved searches I excluded the usernames of the spammy type sellers in the "sellers" section of advanced search, within ebay. I guess if there's a lot of them it's a pain but looks like you can save them as a list then exclude them all.

Looking at Auction Sieve, pretty neat, but I don't think I can get it to ignore those specific annoying auctions that crop up

So I bought an electronic item on Ebay and when it arrived I discovered it's a fake. What are my options? I want to send it back to the seller for a refund but I'm not happy about having to spend postage on returning it. Can I complain to Ebay or Paypal and get a full refund? I've messaged the seller saying it's a fake but haven't heard anything back.

i think it depends on how the seller chooses to handle returns? iirc as a seller you can choose to accept returns at the buyers' expense or your own.

tbh the best option is to hope that the seller doesn't bother replying and then chances are you'll get a full refund by default and get to keep the item to use as a novelty ashtray or whatever

unless it's a knock-off of a high quality novelty ashtray. then just prepare for disappointment

open a case in the resolution centre or whatever they call it requesting refund and return stating reason. seller has a limited period of time in which to respond, if they do not do so then the case is reviewed and if in your favour (i havent dealt with electronics myself but ebay is generally v heavily biased towards buyers for obv reasons) ebay will refund you themselves and chase it up with seller in their own time

they dont oblige you to send it back either

my gf is interested in a Vuitton Noe bag, I was thinking about getting her one for our anniversary

anyone tell me if a listing like this seems legit http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/272515683486 ?

I had a weird buying experience on eBay lately: the item arrived a week late because the seller (1) dispatched it on the last day of the delivery date window and (2) used USPS Media Mail even though the listing said it would ship via Priority Mail. I messaged the seller to express my disappointment, citing eBay's policy w/r/t accurately representing the shipping time/method. at first he apologized profusely, blaming the mistake on a family member and offering to refund me the shipping difference (which was the most I expected: I hadn't opened a case or asked for a refund, and I was really just hoping he'd acknowledge the mishap). but a few minutes later he promised a full refund for the price of the item plus shipping. I replied that it really wasn't necessary to go so far, but he insisted, and at that point he'd already completed the refund.

even though he was clearly in the wrong, I feel a little guilty that he ended up losing money on the transaction. I know eBay will generally side with the buyer in a dispute, but it seems a little extreme for a seller to give a full refund at the drop of the hat when the buyer didn't even request it. is the threat of negative feedback really that compelling, or was he afraid I'd report him for fraud if he didn't smooth things over asap? I've never been in this situation before, so I have no idea how common it is.

(fwiw the item was a radio, so I think he technically committed mail fraud by sending it via media mail)

Nah, not mail fraud. They'd just return it to him for not using enough postage.

Negative feedback is definitely scary to sellers who don't have a lot of feedback to keep their percentage up. I've refunded a couple of people with complaints about condition when I just didn't want to deal with a return - maybe they were scamming me or maybe it got beat up in the mail, just wasn't worth it to find out.

I guess it comes down to a cost-benefit analysis where the seller figures it's better to take a $15 loss now than to potentially lose out on multiple sales if their feedback percentage takes a hit. in my case the seller only has 1 negative feedback (vs 462 positive) for the past year, so I can see why he'd want to keep his record as clean as possible.

do you expect buyers to send you photos of the items they're complaining about? I got a defective item from another seller who didn't accept returns, and I included a bunch of photos of the defect with my refund request to (hopefully) prove that I wasn't a scammer. tbf it's possible that they would have said "fuck it" and given me a refund even if I hasn't provided receipts.

No, I don't think I've ever had someone send photos. On a high dollar item it would be appreciated.

I've been selling quite a bit for the last few years (clearing out my dad's various hobbies for my mom after his death) but return requests have been rare for me so I might just be lax about it. I can only remember one this calendar year.

I dabble in selling and had my first issue with a customer the other day. He sent three photos of a rip in the plastic of a game disc case. I offered 25% back (enough for a fresh new case at least) and he was delighted and I got positive feedback.

It's all pretty random. Of course most buyers don't leave feedback at all.

Being in Canada, I take a risk bothering with low value items at all, shipping them out pretty cheap with no tracking. You can't ship anything here with a tracking number for less than $15. It seems to be pretty common practice around here. In the absence of a tracking number, eBay will always side with a buyer who says nothing showed up. That stuff is just operating on the honour system.

Everything I've read about the accept returns setting (like on eBay forums) makes it sound like you just look sketchy for saying that you don't take them, since eBay essentially has blanket policies to protect buyers as much as possible.