pwcc

[steve B]

As a technical issue any seller who does large volume is in a very bad spot.

As JHS said, it's a lot of hours if you do even a basic search for retractions manually. 96 hours is more than two full weeks of labor just to check something basic. Or at $7 an hour $672. Maybe there's enough in the sellers cut to support that, maybe not. Plus those three full time people will need computers to work with.

And it's fairly easy to beat. Just have multiple accounts, one gets banned, but finds the max bids (But not snipes) Another snipes and that's the shill.

Oh yeah, if it takes 96 hours to check bid history, how long will it take to then cancel bids and ban sellers? Figure at least as long. So double your labor cost.

And that still won't really fix it.
say a bidder with 5 retractions bids on 10 items inside the last few seconds and wins them all.
Sure, you can cancel the sale for not following the auction rules and make second chance offers. But that looks fishy as well doesn't it? (Of course it does, we've all discussed it before)


So the solution needs to be a computerized solution.
I don't think Ebay has a feature to proactively block based on retractions.
So whoever wants to do it will have to come up with their own software.
I believe Ebay can be accessed automatically for the info.
That just leaves writing that program, and making adjustments whenever Ebay decides to make a change behind the scenes.

Have you seen what a really good programmer costs?

Ok, now do the math and figure it out from a purely business perspective. Purely business. Will those things add enough to the bottom line to even cover costs? Maybe it will. Maybe more people would bid or would bid more if they knew almost for sure they wouldn't be shilled.
But you need a lot of sales to cover that. If the consignment fee is 20% you need an extra 3300 a week ( 174720 a year plus since I haven't figured fica etc into labor costs)at the absolute minimum. If you're talking about a computer programmer it's more like 300000 to cover a cheap one.(figuring 60K/year, not unusual for a fresh college grad in programming Good experienced ones cost more, much more but may be faster)

Now wait for it......
A month in you get a C+D letter from Ebay because they really don't want you doing that with their customer data. Or maybe they just want a huge license fee. patent trolls start at around 50K, I'm guessing Ebay would want more.

And there goes a few thousand in development costs. Unless it's actually a patent suit, then it's development costs plus a stack of cash.
(I met someone who wrote their own bidding software that accessed customer data and bids to automate sniping within the last second. They got just such a letter from ebay)


Anyone up for it? Someone want to bankroll the project as a bit of commercial software? I know a few people who could get it done.

Anyone want to try to present it on shark tank?

Steve Birmingham

[tschock]

Originally Posted by steve B

I don't think Ebay has a feature to proactively block based on retractions. - Steve Birmingham

You are correct. They do not.

This whole situation could be easily solved by ebay allowing/exposing the bid retraction number on their "excluded sellers" option list. Similar to they way they allow you to set minimum feedback requirements for bidders who you can prohibit from bidding.

[cyseymour]

Ebay's auction system was never designed for the type of consignments that are taking place. It was originally designed so that people could sell their own items. It worked well for a while, although there was plenty of fakes and scams. Yet now we have the rampant shill bidding as consigners bid up their own items.

You have sellers such as PWCC, Probstein, Just Collect, etc, and then you have the auction houses. Either way, you are not immune to shill bidding - from the consigners on the ebay auction, or with the auction house itself. Even if the auction house is not shill bidding, a consigner could have a friend bid on the card (although there often is no issue with retractions).

Inevitably, everyone is exposed to fraud and dishonesty. PWCC/Prob/JC need to do a better job of monitoring their auctions, but an even greater problem is the image editing. This is the new steroids for baseball cards vis-a-vis the auction houses. Shill bidding has become too risky in the wake of the Mastro arrests, so image editing is the new way to inflate prices.