Posted By:
prewarsportsBob, I ask sellers a lot of questions before I bid on stuff with so many fakes going around and starting about a month ago ebay started to put a big diclaimer at the top and bottom of every e mail to a seller which says that it is against ebay rules sell to end an auction early to sell to another person.
I am not niave enough to think that there is any way they can actually police this, and do not know ebays exact policy but I do know about their new disclaimer refering to a "rule" that it breaks.
I do not have a problem with asking buyers to add a buy it now. I also do not really have a huge problem with the concept of ending an auction early for reasons like errors in the discription, or just plain keeping your item. It isn't even that big of a deal when they have a starting bid of $2000 and you know that is exactly what they want for it, and there are no bids. I just have a problem with this auction in particular because the person was obviously misinformed about the value of their item and they were presumably taken advantage of.
Last week I found an 1887 Reach guide that a person was selling and he also had an N338 SF Hess Dave Orr along with the auction and he had no idea what it was. When I saw what he had I immediately e mailed him and all I said was
"you are going to get people aking you to end this auction early, please do not do it because you have a very nice item and their offers are probably low".
When the auction ended and I won it for $810 he said he had over 10 offers to end the auction and not a single one was for over $250 and since it was the first thing he ever sold on ebay he would have done it had I not e mailed him.
The point of that story is that if people knew why they were getting offers to end auctions, they probably wouldn't do it.
Ebay should just change their disclaimer and say, "If you are getting an offer to end your auction early it is probably worth more than you think and you should seriously consider why the person doesn't just want to bid if their offer is so FAIR". That might actually work.