Pictures in eBay auctions
 

I dont understand some sellers and how they structure their ebay listing. I found a World Series Ticket on ebay I was interested in, but the listing only had a grainy camera picture of the front and no back shot. I email the seller and ask if he would please send me better front and back pictures of the ticket to my email. His response was:
"Hi, there is a front picture shown in the auction. There are no problems on the back. Thanks."

What kind of response is that? I would think that someone asking a few hundred dollars for his ticket would be more catering. Now it just makes me think it is a scam.

Is there something Im missing? Is this out of protocol?

Wait...I just figured out why. OK, can someone explain THIS to me (these are both current listings)....

http://www.ebay.com/itm/1966-FULL-WO...f#ht_500wt_701

http://www.ebay.com/itm/1966-FULL-WO...7#ht_500wt_935

All of their auctions are duplicates of each other with zipshere always having the lower price (and the very high feedback). They also started on ebay within 4months of each other (zipshere being the older of the two).

I believe seller oldiesandgoodiesstore was set up to make it look like you are getting a good deal if you buy from zipshere (hence why their feedback is so high). Yet you are buying from the same person. Yet if someone doesn't do their homework then buys from oldiesandgoodiesstore then they get extra money from the same item.

Yup. Same seller both accounts it looks like.

Back to the issue of the photo. Never understood why some sellers (and this looks like a fairly high volume one), don't figure out how to use a scanner.

A cheap scanner will still give you 1000% better results then a cheap digital camera.

They shouldn't give you a hard time about wanting to see the back either.

I had a similar response earlier this month when I asked a seller who had a few dozen scored scorecards posted if he could either add scans of the scorecards portions (the auction only had pictures of covers and backs) or send me some pictures.

He responded that he had too many auctions, with plenty of bids and even more watchers, and not enough time, and that his auctions were all priced to sell.

My response : "Sorry to be a bother, I was only interested in spending a bunch of my money with you, good thing there are plenty of other places to for me to spend it. Take care."

When his auctions ended, more than 90% closed without a bid. Evidently his definition of priced to sell was different from most buyers.

Doug

Good catch, so would people see this as a good business practice or unethical? I guess eBay is really the only place where I can set up two shops with the expressed intent of making my other shop looking like a bargain. This pretty much seals the deal that I dont want to do business with this guy. Plus that is a lot of duplicate listing fees for the sake of making one item look better over another.

Great response. Im going to borrow this from now on.

Same irritating thing with Pennants. Sellers often fail to show the tip, and of course, this is the most vulnerable spot. The tip is usually just outside of the posted pictures (with no mention of condition in the text).

You have to ask the Seller for specifics... sometimes they answer, but often they don't. Good sellers will email or post close-ups upon request. But if you don't ask, the penannt will typically arrive with the tip end up being frayed, altered, or missing all together.

Unfortunately, ebay is not always the best place for "full disclosure".

I don't know whether it would be ethical or not, but it certainly doesn't seem like the most cost-effective business practice. Especially if you're using the exact same photo for the listing in both stores. On unique items, it's going to be painfully obvious what is going on (as it turned out to be with this ticket), and for items with enough examples out there for the identical photos to be obscured in the mass, the effectiveness of one high-priced example added to the mix is questionable. Seems to me that the better way to go would be to list it once, at the higher price, with a Best Offer option and accept any offers down to the lower selling price or anywhere in between.

In the interest of full-disclosure, I have on occasion doubled up listings like this between two accounts, but only to take advantage of the occasional "free listing day" promotion by eBay (which are not always available to both Store subscribers and non-Store subscribers at the same time). In the end though, it just caused too much confusion for some buyers, even after I explained what I was doing, to be worth the savings in listing fees.

I'm not sure about unethical, but foolish fits easily.

Oh yeah, I want to double my listing fees.
And I'll use a sloppy torn open envelope as a background for my $300 ticket.
And post a big but out of focus picture on one account but a tiny one on another.
And after spending time to crop the picture I won't bother spending another 30 seconds or so to rotate it.

I've seen worse, especially now they've got the "Ebay mobile app" but can't understand why anyone would make such a poor listing for an expensive item. Sure, the cellphone pic showing an open box with what might be some cards in it works for that batch of 88 donruss commons, but for a nice item?

Silly.

Steve B
On the other hand I've gotten some nice stuff from crummy listings so I shouldn't complain......

A lot of sellers only have one imaging method: either they have a scanner but no camera, or vice versa. Even worse are the ones that actually use a cell phone for both taking photos AND posting the item to eBay. Lousy pics are bad enough, but coupled with a description that reads like an 8th-grader's text message, I find myself having a hard time having faith in their "it's in great condition" kind of descriptions.

I guess I can see how someone just selling one or two items here and there might not want to invest in an equipment upgrade and just use what they have on hand. More surprising to me are the sellers who have a store or are selling on a regular basis, and can't seem to understand that purchasing even a low-end scanner or camera will pay dividends once buyer's can actually see details of what they are selling.

my best buy
 

My best buy ever on ebay was from a guy that had a -1 feedback...that's right, a negative 1. Super blurry scan and no one bid on 2 consecutive listings. The guy had a 2 sentence description with quite a few misspelled words. No one bid either time. I ended up buying over 750 cards from him privately after I bought this one. He had it listed for $1500 and I ended up paying $1000. If a card is inexpensive and has a blank back then I don't mind not seeing a scan. For anything else I want to see the back.

http://luckeycards.com/pe902wagner.jpg

There was a dude selling a rare signed book on ebay for a few hundred dollars, but no photo. When I asked to see the signature, he asked for my mailing address so he could mail me a xerox copy of it. Say huh?!

i see some listings of autographs with a very far away shot of the autograph, you cant see any detail or specifics, its about 10 feet away. then they want me to spend hundreds of dollars for it.

sometimes i message them asking if the hubble telescope is included with this auction.

like :p

Sometimes it works to your advantage. There was a Rizzuto autographed Yankees magazine I was interested in but the photo wasn't close enough to tell, especially since the sig was on a fairly "busy" background. I copied the picture to my computer and did a blowup just to see if it was at least worth asking for more pics...it was. I emailed the seller and he was happy to send my additional photos, which were great. Since he didn't put those photos online, I was able to purchase it without anyone else bidding.