I get most of my bargains from scanning ebay regularly for lathe and mill tooling and similar. At the moment there is one particular seller who is making life difficult for any potential buyers.

Based in Italy, it is easy to see which firm is causing the problems.

1. Their prices equal or exceed the full commercial value.

2. They have a small number of variations in their very high postage rates which stands out.

3. They are currently listing over 13000 items which are hard to avoid.

4. So far in the last couple of months at least, they have sold less than 900 items.

What do you think, am I right to rant?

How are they making life difficult? If you don’t their prices (or anyone else’s for that matter), don’t buy from them.

i don’t see what the problem is.

Brian

Too right but I'm sure you can exclude sellers in the advanced options, I've also noticed new sellers with 'genuine' Loctite 50mls for £9.99!

Roger

Use the search filter, you can set it to show results from only UK sellers. You can also search for used items only etc. Or any combination.

I will look into the advanced options to see if I can exclude them.

As for the Loctite being cheap, it is now made in China and is definitely genuine. The inflated prices we were used to are now a thing of the past. It is now cheaper than genuine printer ink!

Removed, as I don’t think the link works correctly.

it was a link to an article where ‘

China Arrests 103 Accused of Making Counterfeit German Adhesive

 It was about Loctite. The arrests were made just before Christmas last year.
 

Ketan at ARC

Edited By Ketan Swali on 05/01/2020 21:08:47

Edited By Ketan Swali on 05/01/2020 21:10:13

Edited By Ketan Swali on 05/01/2020 21:16:36

dont take any notice of the location filter - the chinese all say they are UK based. Take a look at delivery time, anything over a week is suspect. I get annoyed by the advertised amount bearing no relationship to the actual amount...its a minefield!

Have you checked the Henkel website?

**LINK**

If your lucky the location filter will put the local stuff at the top but what complicates things is when you have a seller stating the item is located in your country but when you click on the sellers name it shows they are located overseas , i have had items i have purchased turn up in two days from sellers like this and it did come from the area they said it was located so some are telling the truth and many are not !

There is a seller on Ebay in Australia that drives me nuts - they sell drill bits and list every size individually , thankfully they only list them occasionally !

You don't need the advanced section, just one of the filters on the left is for UK.
Then you check it is showing the category , near the top of the page, that you want. Sometimes it plays with that.
When you get the combination you like copy and save the address line which will have those options embedded in it. Make sure you are saving the general list not a specific item. It will have PrefLoc=1 in it which is UK, Loc 2 is world, Loc 3 is Europe, a page number of the list "pgn=" is embedded in it too, also nkw=lingerie or whatever you were searching for.

I've build up my own exclusion lists for my saved searches and save them as a text file which I open before browsing E-Bay. Before perusing the results of the basic search I open the advanced options and cut and paste the relevant line into the text box with the "exclude seller" tick box checked. Then run the search again to get results sans dross. UK only is my default for saved searches anyway.

As a Mac user I keep the exclusion list in TextEdit but I'm sure Windows and Linux folk have something equally effective.

Obviously every time I hit a new dross source I copy the selelr and add to my list.

My current pet peeve is that E-Bay changes have broken the sniper program I use (JB Bidwatcher). Whats worse it seems the guy who wrote it has given up supporting it so i've either got to find something else or get used to hangigna round until its almost the end of the auction. What I loved about the sniper was being able to set a rationally decided maximum value and just leave it to do its thing. If I won the auction, fine, if not someone else paid over the odds.

Clive

I use Snipe It which sits on the Ebay web page for setting a max value, Goofbay is good for Ebay mining and will snipe as well.

Roger

What do they cost?

Just been on with my usual search and someone is listing 1 inch nails individually at £5 + postage.

Ebay do not like snipers. They reduce Ebay's profits. I can no longer usr my long-time used sniper because the log-in requres an anti-robot process to complete. Great shame but Ebay's loss in the long run as I will look for other sources.

rgds

Bill

Old Mart, what was it you were searching for?

I do appreciate the problem as sometimes when I seek a particular item, one seller includes dozens or even hundreds of the same item.

i.e. I look for a generic item for my motorcycle and one particular product is listed dozens of times by the same seller as xxxxx-Honda, xxxxx-Honda CB250, xxxx-Honda Xl500 etc etc. It takes forever to scroll past to find the next vendor selling a different product.

Bill

So why not name them then?

Report them to ebay. They are not supposed to list multiple copies of the same item. There is a limit of 10. There is a "Report item" link on every listing. This comes under listing practices.

Robert G8RPI.

Can someone tell me in simple English, why people are so afraid to name companies or traders by name, you see stupid things like epay or the item was carp. If the original listing was by J Bloggs and Co and was clearly not right in some aspect, why not just point out that J Bloggs and Co have a stupid listing running, is it really likely to lead to legal action?

As an ebay trader I was notified last year that they were going to clamp down on this as it was a major source of complaints.

I would expect improvements to this. Whilst ebay may be slow and ineffective in many things they tend to be much more effective when their bottom line is at stake.

Regards.

David.