pwcc

[D. Bergin]

You cannot police every auction of every bidder and weed out who is a serial retractor or not.

It really doesn't matter anymore. It's not just shillers who are doing this, it's bidders who have decided this is a great bidding strategy for them to suss out the high bid.

You can however, very easily weed out the bidders who are placing retractions in YOUR auctions. Every time somebody retracts a bid in one of your auctions, you receive an e-mail from Ebay telling you this. It's not rocket science and it's not time consuming. A couple circumstances like this happening in YOUR auctions, you do a little investigating, you confront the bidder with a message, and then you cut the bidder off at the knees or find out he has a tremendously valid reason for doing what he did.

[Leon]

Originally Posted by D. Bergin

You cannot police every auction of every bidder and weed out who is a serial retractor or not.

It really doesn't matter anymore. It's not just shillers who are doing this, it's bidders who have decided this is a great bidding strategy for them to suss out the high bid.

You can however, very easily weed out the bidders who are placing retractions in YOUR auctions. Every time somebody retracts a bid in one of your auctions, you receive an e-mail from Ebay telling you this. It's not rocket science and it's not time consuming. A couple circumstances like this happening in YOUR auctions, you do a little investigating, you confront the bidder with a message, and then you cut the bidder off at the knees or find out he has a tremendously valid reason for doing what he did.

I was only referring to people bidding in his auctions.....but not where they had done it previously. If they retracted 50 bids, and then bid in his auction and canceled it, ban them. There aren't millions of people doing this. After the first 20-30 I am going to guess you have most of the major bid retractors bidding in your auctions banned and taken care of. Again, it's one small step but one in the right direction, imo. I am not talking about policing all of ebay, only one's own auctions...and then only with major bid retractors. This wouldn't be that difficult.

[tschock]

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.

[steve B]

Originally Posted by tschock

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.

Ok, I wasn't aware that could be done that way.

I'll consider myself proven wrong about a major portion of the costs.

Someone would still have to check out those bidders, but with the largest part of the job done it's a much quicker task.

Even as a quick proof of concept this should be made available to sellers. If I was still selling and doing large volume I'd want it.


Steve B

[tschock]

Originally Posted by steve B

Ok, I wasn't aware that could be done that way.

I'll consider myself proven wrong about a major portion of the costs.

Someone would still have to check out those bidders, but with the largest part of the job done it's a much quicker task.

Even as a quick proof of concept this should be made available to sellers. If I was still selling and doing large volume I'd want it.


Steve B

Steve,

Just to clarify. My comment wasn't directed at you (or anyone in particular).

And you are correct about needing to follow up with specific items/bidders. My "sample" shows 8 retractions as the highest, but my sample only grabbed 150 bidders (and I didn't filter out which completed items, so it could have been grabbing $20 sales as well, meaning there are other things that can be tweaked). When you start grabbing more, you only need to start at the highest # and work down. I think there were those here that "found" bidders in the 50s for retractions. But even double digit retractions alone should start to give one pause. That is, if the seller actually wants to deal with this.

[steve B]

Originally Posted by tschock

Steve,

Just to clarify. My comment wasn't directed at you (or anyone in particular).

And you are correct about needing to follow up with specific items/bidders. My "sample" shows 8 retractions as the highest, but my sample only grabbed 150 bidders (and I didn't filter out which completed items, so it could have been grabbing $20 sales as well, meaning there are other things that can be tweaked). When you start grabbing more, you only need to start at the highest # and work down. I think there were those here that "found" bidders in the 50s for retractions. But even double digit retractions alone should start to give one pause. That is, if the seller actually wants to deal with this.

I didn't take it as anything personal.

I'm not all that shy about putting my opinions out there on technical issues.
But part of that is that if I get it wrong I'm ok with admitting it.
I don't like being wrong and try to avoid it, but it happens.

Steve B

[steve B]

For what it's worth my scanner - Epson perfection 2400, with the updated version of the twain driver/scanning software - Auto corrects brightness depending on the object and background. It usually comes out accurate to what I see. The only thing I adjust is the DPI, but using different settings like document or and I'm probably off on the numbers, 16 or 24 bit color will produce slightly different results.

Steve B

[D. Bergin]

Originally Posted by Leon

I was only referring to people bidding in his auctions.....but not where they had done it previously. If they retracted 50 bids, and then bid in his auction and canceled it, ban them. There aren't millions of people doing this. After the first 20-30 I am going to guess you have most of the major bid retractors bidding in your auctions banned and taken care of. Again, it's one small step but one in the right direction, imo. I am not talking about policing all of ebay, only one's own auctions...and then only with major bid retractors. This wouldn't be that difficult.

I think we are saying the same thing Leon.

[thecatspajamas]

Originally Posted by D. Bergin

You can however, very easily weed out the bidders who are placing retractions in YOUR auctions. Every time somebody retracts a bid in one of your auctions, you receive an e-mail from Ebay telling you this. It's not rocket science and it's not time consuming. A couple circumstances like this happening in YOUR auctions, you do a little investigating, you confront the bidder with a message, and then you cut the bidder off at the knees or find out he has a tremendously valid reason for doing what he did.

Where can I turn on this eBay automatic notice of someone retracting a bid in my auction? I haven't found any way to turn on or opt in for such a notification.

I say this in all sincerity, because I was just about to suggest that the easiest way for eBay to police this kind of thing would be to let the seller know every time it happens. Get 30 notices in a day of the same guy bidding and retracting in your auction, and you're bound to notice them clogging up your inbox, no matter how many listings you have. That also saves you the trouble of having to suss out who the serial retractors are. All you have to do is look for the recurring eBay ID's in your inbox, and act accordingly to ban those from bidding on your auctions.

I've never found a way to set up such notifications though. I don't sell at near the level of pwcc, but I know for a fact that I have had retractions on my auctions in the past where I wasn't notified (I only noticed because an item that was at the top of the list in number of bids dropped down when I refreshed the screen, without any other bids having come in. I confirmed it by checking the bid history, but wouldn't have thought to do so otherwise).

[D. Bergin]

Originally Posted by thecatspajamas

Where can I turn on this eBay automatic notice of someone retracting a bid in my auction? I haven't found any way to turn on or opt in for such a notification.

I say this in all sincerity, because I was just about to suggest that the easiest way for eBay to police this kind of thing would be to let the seller know every time it happens. Get 30 notices in a day of the same guy bidding and retracting in your auction, and you're bound to notice them clogging up your inbox, no matter how many listings you have. That also saves you the trouble of having to suss out who the serial retractors are. All you have to do is look for the recurring eBay ID's in your inbox, and act accordingly to ban those from bidding on your auctions.

I've never found a way to set up such notifications though. I don't sell at near the level of pwcc, but I know for a fact that I have had retractions on my auctions in the past where I wasn't notified (I only noticed because an item that was at the top of the list in number of bids dropped down when I refreshed the screen, without any other bids having come in. I confirmed it by checking the bid history, but wouldn't have thought to do so otherwise).

I always assumed it's a default setting because I've always received an e-mail when somebody retracts a bid in one of my auctions. I didn't realize others were not getting retraction notices.

I'm guessing it may be more an e-mail client setting then an Ebay setting. Maybe going to the spam box for some reason.