Quote:
Originally Posted by Runscott
Dave, it is about the agreement with the seller. If the seller is okay with him appearing to be a shill, why do you personally care?
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You think he has 93 bid retractions with a single seller he had a conversation with?
I didn't see him mentioning a conversation or an agreement was made with ANY seller he made a retraction on. Just that they were lower end items, they didn't involve baseball, and thus it didn't matter that he pulled his bid on those auctions.
As long as he wasn't affecting the higher end baseball market, it was ok in his mind.
......on top of that, there's enough paranoid bidders that Ebay has helped cultivate with their practices, that every time Phil shows up as an underbidder on a "higher end baseball" auction, and the other bidders do a simple click of the mouse, they see the guy they are bidding against has more retractions then they have won items on his record. Generally they either run to NET54 and wonder out loud if the guy they are bidding against is a shill (10 other guys jump on the bandwagon and say they will never do business with this seller again), or they don't say a word, and they temper their bidding accordingly.
It's not just this board either. I've ventured on Ebay buyer boards on occasion and they are littered with threads of people asking "Have I just been shilled". Sometimes they were shilled, but 90% of the time I believe it's a situation with a bidder like this in the mix..........but most don't want to hear that, usually it's the seller that gets demonized in the process, not the ones interfering with the auction.
Right now he has bid on 11 items in the last 30 days, he has 5 bid retractions in that same amount of time.
He has
93 retractions in the last 180 days.
93. That's not a "whoopsie". If he has the blessings of other sellers because of this, he's either building up his retractions, to scare other bidders away on the items he REALLY wants, or he's just inconvenienced 93 others sets of sellers and bidders on items he DIDN'T really want.
I really have a hard time believing there's some benevolent reason for this.
I personally care, because this type of bidding has become epidemic on the site. It affects the entire realm of collectibles and it affects bidder confidence in general.
I've spoken to more then one collector over the years who say they don't bid on Ebay anymore because of the shenanigans that they think go on there. Whether their fears are founded or unfounded doesn't really matter. The perception is there.