[glchen]

I agree with some of the others in that PWCC should give bidders advance notice of the # of retractions that they will allow, and give bidders time to "wind down" the number of retractions that they use as part of their bidding strategies. I've only had 2-3 retractions in nearly 20 years on ebay, but some bidders do use it more frequently, some for nefarious purposes, others not. If PWCC does not give bidders time to wind down their retractions, then these bidders would need to create new user id's, or not bid at all.

Here are some retraction reasons that I have heard, some of which may be legitimate:

(1) Honest error. You meant to bid $30, but accidentally entered $300. Personally, this has happened to me a couple of times.

(2) Retracting a Best Offer. You are interested in an ebay listing with Best Offer, but the price is a little high. However, ebay comes out with a 10% ebay bucks promotion, which will make the listing worth it, but only if the seller accepts your best offer price. You submit your best offer, but the seller does not respond to it before the ebay bucks promotion expires. Since your offer took into account the promotion, you retract your best offer.

(3) You agree to an off-ebay deal with the seller on which you have the high bid. For example, you see a card that you are interested in with a Start Price of $500 for a 7 day ebay auction. You put down a bid on that card for $500. However, then you chat with the seller, and you agree to purchase that card off-ebay for $750. Since you've agreed to this deal, you retract your bid on the ebay listing, so that the ebay seller will not be hit with an ebay Final Value Fee for ending the ebay listing early.

(4) You retract your high bid on an ebay auction because you've already purchased the same item elsewhere (or have spent the money that you planned to purchase that card on another item). Obviously, this is sketchy, unethical territory where you really should honor your bid. You put the bid down, so even if you bought the same card at a better price elsewhere, you should be prepared to honor that bid you placed.

I had a similar case happen to me a couple of years ago on PWCC. I was interested in purchasing a 1975 mid-high grade complete set, and PWCC had a number of these in that auction. I put snipes on 2-3 of these sets. I lost all of them. After I lost these sets, I looked at the bidding history and I saw that for two of the sets, I was the immediate underbidder, and that the same bidder had won both of those sets. The very next day, I received a second chance offer for one of those sets (which I declined). I highly suspect that the winning bidder didn't want both sets, so he just picked the better one, and told PWCC that he didn't want the other one (or made a mistake, some other excuse). This is because I received the second chance offer the day after the auction ended, and not a couple of weeks due to typical non-paying bidder case. I would hope that in this case, PWCC will in the future ban this bidder as a non-paying bidder from their auctions.

(5) You retract a bid in order to see a seller's hidden reserve. As a seller you can place reserves in your auction listings. If a buyer wants to see the seller's reserve, they can place a very high bid, where the seller's reserve is exposed, and then retract that bid after they consider whether the reserve is reasonable. However, ebay expressly forbids this type of bid retraction (although some bidders do it anyway).

(6) You retract after seeing the high bidders max bid. Again, another illegal bid retraction. This is the case where the bidder is not related to the seller in any way, but wants to see what the current high bidder's max bid is. You bid to a very high level, and then retract it. Again, although this is not shill bidding, this type of bidding/retraction is unethical and forbidden by ebay.