Ebay site changes for the worst

Has anyone else noticed that you now cant check other bidders who are bidding on auctions to see if you are being shilled.?

I stopped bidding on ebay items about 4 years ago.

Haven't been sniped or shilled since!

Still use buy it now though.

I havent used Ebay for many years, if my daughter spots something she tells me and bids for me.

Martin P

True, cou can see the bids but not the bidder...in my case I often find listings there are no bids on and just put a bid when the auction is almost over. Got a couple of good deals.

Just pay what you think it's worth.

Tony

It has been like that for years. We used to be able to avoid bidding against ‘friends’.

I once put about £400 on an item to stymie a bidder, but a friend paid more than the other bidder at the end of the auction. She did the same to me, inadvertently, about a year later on a rare machine. We then got together by email to avoid bidding against each other.

Getting together as a group to bid, and then having a ‘knock’ as we called it, was a regular event at auctions I used to go to.

I have noticed that for a year or two now the picture appears higher than it should, sometimes over the title, and the control for the enlarged version way lower than it should. It is ok on Chrome so assume this is some slimy anti-Microsoft ploy.

Not done it yet

its only changed in the last few days

you used to be able to click on bidders in an auction and see what categories and sellers they had been bidding with therefore knowing that perhaps shilling was going on

I think you are meaning that bidders full names have been hidden that was a few years ago

ISTR that the hiding of bidders' names was claimed to be to prevent sellers offering duplicate items to the second-place bidders in an auction, outside of EBay's system. that change made shilling much harder to detect. The new change, means that shilling is impossible to detect.

It took me a little while to see what the change was (the lack of a link on the obfuscated names), because virtually none of the stuff that I search for every day had any bidders today...

The best technique is to wait until about three seconds from he auction closing, and bid what you genuinely feel is the most the item is worth to you.

if someone beats that using a 'sniping' program, good luck to them.

Neil

Ian,

You’re right, it has changed again. Items cheaper than the seller’s normal BIN price are either shilled up to a reasonable profit or they are sub-standard items. I never bother with those auctions as I know they are dodgy. The only way around this is to contact the seller about the item and hope they get back to you.

They will soon prevent any contact details appearing on any item auction. At present, some items have contact numbers.and even an address Then, hopefully, more will sell by their real name, so they are readily contacted after a simple telephone number search.

Slight digression:

I have started receiving quite a lot of 'Special Offer' prices from ebay ... where the Seller has apparently chosen to offer a discounted price to a group of watchers.

But ... the link doesn't take me to to a discounted price !!

Is this an 'undocumented feature' of ebay functionality on the iPad ?

MichaelG.

I’ve not experienced that on mine - yet. But I avoid as many third party adverts as possible - something to do with candies on the computer, perhaps?

Here's an example: screen-grab of an eMail received yesterday, from ebay:

'View item' works fine [showing full price]

'Review offer' does not do anything useful, just opens my ebay home-page.

MichaelG.

i've never received such an offer based on my watch list. Indeed, when I've had items listed for sale, I've not been aware of who the watchers were or how to contact them. TBH, I'd be suspicious of a scam, or at least, an attenpt to circumvent Ebay's rules.

Add:-  just looked at Ebay page, maybe this is a fairly new legitimate feature, so above comment is incorrect.

Edited By Clive Brown 1 on 18/09/2019 10:02:47

.

Interesting/Worrying thought, Clive

but the eMail certainly appears to be from ebay.

< [email protected] >

MichaelG.

I did notice that the wording in the email "you've showed" should perhaps have been "you've shown"; if so, possibly an indicator of a fake?

.

One would have preferred to see 'shewn' ...

MichaelG.

I think it's ligit, I get the same myself.
One of the options when selling, is to let ebay manage the price to increase the likelihood of a sale; it can auto discount when re-listing as an example.
I don't sell much so I've not explored the feature yet.

p.s. Anyone want to buy a small internal van tail-lift

Bill