Ebay trend?

[John Z.]

I am curious to know what others think:

The last FIVE TIMES I have noticed a large format lens on EBAY that I seriously wanted to consider bidding on, the for sale ad was quickly ended after only two days, with usually no bids. I have been looking around for Protar, anastigmat, and longer Dagor lenses for some time.

Three times in the last week alone a Protar lens was listed, and then unlisted within a day!
At least this is saving me some money!
None of the ads had the 'Buy it now" option. What is happening apparently is that a seller lists an item, and gets bombarded with offers to sell the lens immediately, and makes a deal. It is somewhat frustrating to see a nice lens disappear every time I am watching it. In each case I sent an e-mail to the seller to ask if the lens was still for sale, with no response (reputable sellers in many cases, too).

I don't know if I should fault the seller, who is just making the sale
(? and avoiding EBAY fees), or the buyers, who are circumventing the system.
Should I start doing the same thing?

 

[Dave Parker]

Circumventing fee's seem to be quite a popular thing now a days, I see it quite often on things I look at, I recently purchased a couple of batteries for my video camera, the price for the batteries were riduculously low, something like a $1.47 and the shipping was $10.00! which is fine, I spent about $12.00 by time it was said and done, but I knew exactly what the buyer was doing, they don't charge fee's on the shipping costs, the quick end auctions seem to be the same thing, all's they are paying is the listing fee, and ending the auction early to avoid the final value fee's, I am sure at sometime in the future ebay may figure a way around this as well, but time will tell.

Dave

 

[Anupam Basu]

A trick is to make a minimum bid on something that you are interested in. Items can only be withdrawn if there are no bids on them - so just bid a dollar and it should stay.

 

[robsoe]

Ebay still gets a piece of the ridiculously high shipping cost from paypal percentage. Seller can still cancel an auction even when there is bidder.

 

[manjo]

I have had mixed results buying from private person on ebay, I rather bid on auctions by shops. At least u can report them to BBB or ebay if they do such a thing. And like someone mentioned, you should bid a $ on the item that way it cannot be removed from the auction.

 

[Dave Parker]

Ebay still gets a piece of the ridiculously high shipping cost from paypal percentage. Seller can still cancel an auction even when there is bidder.

I don't understand what your talking about, they only get a percentage if the buyer pays with paypal and use the paypal shipping service, I don't and have sold thousands of items through ebay, but again they only get a percentage if the buyer pays through paypal, I don't use the ebay shipping service and the paypal fee's are not that high when your a business, I just did a cost comparison and I can tell you to have a regular merchant account would have cost me about 1% more than what paypal currently charges..and that comparison was done over two years worth of transactions..you can cancel an auction, even if there is a bid on it, by just stating the item is no longer available.

Dave

 

[argus]

Whenever I see an item that I would *really* want to buy and the starting bid is within my estimated budget, I place a bid on the starting price. That way I avoid that the auction is withdrawn.
This is a good strategy to see if the seller uses a secondary account to higher the sale price. I already nailed 3 sellers that systematically placed higher manual bids with 1, 5, or 20 Euro increments. A simple look in the seller and bidder history tells a lot.

I don't bid on auctions that state that the item is listed elsewhere and may be withdrawn early. Those guys seem to invite offers outside of ebay.

G