Reporting Ebay Sellers

[Soapz]

Hello everyone,

I thought some of you might be interested in my newest ebay-adventure. 

Earlier this week I bid on an ebay auction (Bespaq item) with a pleasantly low starting bid. The auction would have ended today around lunch time. When I checked the auction this morning at 7am - I was the only and highest bidder, nobody was watching the item and I thought I might actually get lucky on this one. When I came home tonight - the item had disappeared from my summary page - I couldn't find it under the bids/offers, it wasn't on my purchase list or on the didn't win list. When I checked my emails, I had a "cancelled bid" notice from the seller, who cancelled my bid around 9 this morning saying that the item wasn't in stock anymore. (At that point I was pretty @#$@#^#$$!!!!). So I looked up the item number and saw that the seller cancelled my bid and sold the same item to someone else at noon for only $6 more than my bid? And to make my day even better, the seller relisted the same item again. My evening went downhill from there....

So, I dug around a bit more and figured out that the seller had done the same thing at least twice more in the last few days - always an underpriced miniature sold to the same buyer who bought my item and then those items were relisted the same day and are active. I called ebay and reported the seller for fraudulent selling/bidding practices. The first person I talked to tried to be helpful and told me they would investigate. I complained some more and was transferred to a supervisor where I pointed out that there is enough bad business on ebay and that I would expect a complaint with evidence, auction numbers and seller-id would be taken more seriously. It took about 45min. but I am happy to say that the seller is now suspended. I sure hope this whole thing was worth it to the seller. If they had at least send me a message or just outbid me - I wouldn't have noticed or cared. But cancelling my bid for no reason? Not going to happen. 

So, if anyone of you who buys on ebay sees something fishy - report it and make them listen. There are enough negative things going on on ebay - getting rid of one bad egg makes our lives maybe a little bit easier.

[KathieB]

Nice work, Chris!  

[Cathy C]

Thank you for taking the time to do this.  And if I ever find myself in a similar situation, I will do the same.

[aggiemae]

What eBay does with problem sellers is hit or miss. I had the same person buy from me cancel the order and then after I allowed it gave me negative (and nasty) feedback. The people had two a counts and were buying from competitors on one account and leaving negative feedback but selling on another account. EBay suspended the buying account but  took over a month to suspend the account they were selling on.

Good that you took the time to take action.

[havanaholly]

Good on you, Chris!

[Mimajo]

You go girl!

[fov]

Something like that happened to me once (low starting bid --> canceled a day or so before the auction ended with the item "no longer available") but I didn't look into it further. I wonder if it was the same seller. This was a couple of years ago.

 

[shannonc60]

Good on you for standing up! I haven't had too many problems with ebay, but have with other sites. I sell on Etsy and there are heaps of things on there that either breach copyrights or aren't handmade and the Etsy people just don't care. I have had issues with dodgy apartment rentals on Tripadvisor and been threatened by the apartment owners and after reporting them to Tripadvisor, nothing's been done. I guess like many websites, they just get too big to enforce their own policies.