I think one of the things that many agree with is that numerous bid retractions could a sign of shilling. If nothing else, they are definitely a sign of a "suspect buyer".
So.... it's time to put the myth to bed on how "time intensive" or "expensive" it is to monitor and act on possible shill bidders on ebay. Submitted for your approval...
Since my last post (less than 2 hours ago), I downloaded a FREE web crawler and configured it to show me a list of all the PWCC ebay auctions that completed in the last 7 days, view ALL the bidders on those auctions, and extract the number of bid retractions EACH bidder had for the past 6 months. This is under the Bid Extract column at the bottom. Each line in the bottom section is a list of the bid retractions in the last 6 months and the URL to a SPECIFIC buyer. There could be duplicates, but this could be filtered out.
This was a a POC (proof of concept) approach from myself, and while having some background working with computers, I have NO experience with web crawlers. That is why the output is somewhat "dirty" but could be beefed up and made pretty with probably a little more effort. Obviously from my lousy jpg I'm not one to be doing scan enhancements.
However the point is this:
It is NOT difficult NOR expensive for someone selling on ebay to monitor and trace back bid retractions.
Note: I am
NOT saying that PWCC knows about this or is involved with this or doesn't care. It was simply an exercise to point out how simple and cheap this is to do, if one has the desire to do so.