Quote:
Originally Posted by vintagetoppsguy
When the OP first asked this question, I gave my opinion and told him that he would get many different answers on this subject. Now here we are 44 posts later. Steve, I enjoy reading your posts and think you are a great guy, but come on, are you really comparing illegal activity with asking a seller to end an item early?
|
It's just the attitude of justification that anything is ok because it's only "a little wrong" or "since other people do it I have to"
Yes, my examples were a bit extreme except the steroids one. Many of the substances taken were legal and not against baseballs rules at the time. Others could be legally prescribed, and were also within baseballs rules. Probably more within the rules than ending early to sell off Ebay.
And it does harm people, even if only slightly in each situation.
Lets say I plan on bidding $150. but someone sends an offer of $125 and the seller ends early. The seller is out $25, Ebay is out their percentage, and I'm out the opportunity to compete for the card and potentially buy it. (To be clear I'm not including fixed price listings with the make an offer feature, just auctions.)
The first two can be measured, but the third isn't readily assigned a value.
The last harm and hardest to pin down is that after seeing auctions pulled a few times I may be less inclined to watch or bid o anything. And that drives the overall activity down if it's a common enough thing.
There are about 340000 card auctions right now, if only 10% of them are affected by one bid increment of 50 cents that's roughly 17,000 a week or close to 900,000 a year in lost sales just in cards.
The argument culd be made that nobody can know the auction would have brought more. But not knowing something happened doesn't mean it didn't happen.
Steve B