I will defend Ebay as being a great marketplace if used wisely. If you do a little research about the item you are bidding on as well as on the seller (About Me page and Feedback should tell you everything you need to know), you will find that there are some great deals to be had...as well as some hard to find items that you probably won't find anywhere else. As for the auction listed above...if it were my auction, I would feel guilty taking that amount of money. One thing I usually list in my descriptions is the retail price of the item being sold. This helps educate the buyers as to what is a reasonable and fair price for the item being sold. I have found Ebay to have the largest buyer base for my business, and it also works well as a marketing tool to bring buyers to my online store as well. I'm not saying that all sellers are as honest and straightforward as myself, but the dishonest sellers and non-model RR sellers are usually pretty easy to spot with a little research before bidding. Here is a good guideline: Look for sellers with a feedback rating of 250 or more and over 99% Positive. If a seller meets this criteria you are probably pretty safe. If the seller does not meet this (specifically 99%+ positive) then you are probably taking a chance that you are dealing with a questionable seller. This rule is not perfect, but the only bad Ebay deals I have ever had were from sellers who were below these figures.
There have been several studies of shilling on eBay, and (in general) they suggest that the practice is unfortunately quite common in some areas, such as laptop batteries. However, you can protect yourself to some extent by using the Bidders tool at http://toolhaus.org/. To use this tool, copy an item number and paste it in the box. Here's what you see when you type in the item number of the auction we're discussing: Toolhaus.org 'Bidders' results for item number 6041190362 The Bidders tool does NOT "prove" that one or more of the bidders is a shill. Rather, it's a matter of interpretation. Studies of eBay shilling show the following: </font> A shill is closely associated with a given seller - the shill bids on many of the seller's auctions, even when there is no apparent common interest among the various items being sold -- for example, somebody bids on locos in several different scales</font> Shills bid early</font> Shills rarely win</font> Is a shill at work in this auction? I don't think so. If you look at Carsten bids in other auctions, you'll see that this bidder has won several auctions and has a consistent bid history (so does the $200 bidder). I think this is clearly a case of somebody saying, "I've got to have this." Intuitively, I think that shilling is less common in N-scale auctions than elsewhere in eBay. There are quite a few sellers who genuinely care about their reputation; they also know that the N scale community is small and, if they tried any tricks, word would get around. Refs R. J. Kauffman and C. A. Wood. Running up the bid: detecting, predicting, and preventing reserve price shilling in online auctions. In International Conference on Electronic Commerce, Pittsburgh, PA, 2003. Rubin, Shai, et al. "An Auctioning Reputation System Based on Anomaly Detection.' Available online at http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~shai/p12-rubin.pdf. H. S. Shah, N. R. Joshi, A. Sureka, and P. R. Wurman. Mining eBay: Bidding strategies and shill detection. In Springer-Verlag, editor, 4th International Workshop on Mining Web Data for Discovering Usage Patterns and Profiles, Edmonton, Alberta, July 2003.
eBay is actually what renewed my interest in the hobby after a ten year hiatus! (That and the fact that I realized I had money for it that I didn't have as a teenager.) A lot of the items I have bought (e.g. Interrail thrall doublestacks and Port of Hollywood K-Line containers) are OOP and just cannot be found elsewhere. But I have also gotten deals on these items, and saved a lot of money on locos as well. So far I have not had any major problems with model railroad stuff. The only big eBay problem I had was in the musical instrument category, and even then, the sellar and I worked out an agreement after a few e-mails. Common sense dictates the following: -Check a sellers feedback. -Only bid on items you are previously familiar with, and know the value of. (I've made a couple small mistakes there, my own fault, and not much money.) -Try to think of anything that would dissapoint you and make sure it's mentioned or shown in the listing. i.e, unless it's listed as "NEW in box", "no missing parts" etc, or there are detailed photos that satisfy you, don't bid. If you are going to complain to the seller later, it must be on the basis of something that was shown or said in the listing. Beware of listings that use stock photos from the manufacturer instead of photos of the actual item being sold. -Understand how the bidding system works, think carefully about your maximum bid, and bid once.
Bryan...Great Explanation post. I've never seen that. Very informative I buy and sell all the time on ebay. most who have posted here follow the same practices...'Know your seller, know your buyer, know your limitations. As a buyer you have to know what price your willing to pay for a KNOWN product...then set your own limit to how bad you want the item.
Ben's post is spot on with my experiences with eBay. I have bought several hundred items on eBay, many long out of production and un-obtainable anywhere else. I have purchased many NIB currently available items at far below what even the major discounters sell them for. I have also purchased from at least a dozen regular posters here on Trainboard, including several retailers that regularly sell on eBay. Don't get caught up in a bidding war, and to reiterate Ben's point Only bid on items you are previously familiar with, and know the value of. (unless it is something I am selling, then feel free to go crazy) Investigate feedback closely. A negative feedback needs to be looked at, but look for the reason for it, and the response to it. If the seller replies to negative feedback with rudeness and name calling, avoid him. If he handles it politely, with tact, and has a reasonable explanation, and it is just a few isolated incidents out of many transactions, I will still deal with him. Sometimes sellers have problems that take time to resolve and the buyers don't have enough patience to let them work it out. An example was Trainboards own Longtrain, who had multiple health incidents over the course of selling some of his stuff.
I'll agree that ebay has its place but one has to be a bit careful. Ebay can be a fantastic place to find (or sell) out-of-production locos, cars, etc. that would be difficult to locate any other way. Some good deals can be had, but one does have to watch for getting carried away with bidding. Shill bidding does seem to happen, but the great majority of sales on ebay appear to be legitimate.
I don't know how anyone would even take that chance since shill bidding is a Federal crime and about 2 years ago the FCC and the FTC teemed up to crackdown on E-bay sellers who did this charging them for Unlawful doctoring of a contracting bid. and Unlawful crimes committed using communications equipment. amongst some others and they CONVICTED Many. Which from I understand there is a minimum of 3 yrs? Imprisonment for each of the listed????????????? I personally wouldn't want to take that chance to make a buck no matter how much I wanted to make more. The profit don't seem to fit the punishments??????? Well, at least that's my opinion so if that's a ligament bid than the seller is damn lucky and the buyer??????? Well, I hope he doesn't regret the deal.
kevin, as mentioned by others, shill bidding is basically the seller, either himself or through the help of another, placing "fake bids" on an auction to inflate the price. this can be done in ways that are hard to catch... like the couple art galleries that bid on each OTHERS art listings... what happened was that once someone placed their max bid...the "competitive" gallery would then procede to place bids right up to the max... effectively forcing the original bidder to fork over much more than he would have had to pay had it been an honest auction ("market value"). this type of manipulation of auctions is highly looked down upon. matt, can't say how common shill bidding is. though i'm sure ebay keep their own records of whats going on... anyone who has a complaint, can report it to ebay, and they would conduct their own investigation. but you'd never find out 'bout whatever action they take...if any. even if you were cheated...and they confirm it...
