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Posted By: Cat

Although I have never ended an auction early to sell off-line, I do not feel any obligation to treat EBay fairly. I believe you get treated fairly if you treat others fairly. EBay's practices of deception is motivated by greed and perhaps that's OK, but on the other hand they shouldn't feel slighted if someone cheats them out of a few bucks on an occasional off-line sell. EBay knows when they are going to have "dump days" many days in advance, but they never let sellers know in advance, since they don't want sellers to postpone their normal Sunday listings when they learn that a mid-week "dump day" is coming. Very deceitful, if you ask me. The hiding of the underbidder names was an effort to stop off-line sells, but it sure did create a nice opportunity for the fraudsters. I know of no effort by EBay to stop shilling, even though they know they opened a huge door for this. I doubt that shilling would be hard to block, if they wanted to (at least block bidding on the item from the same IP address that it was listed from).

If EBay changed their practices to protect and treat fairly both buyers and sellers I would feel differently.