PWCC & eBay - help us improve the hobby

[Brent Huigens]

Dear Fellow Collectors,

I need to get something off my chest. My general policy is to let the message boards run free, but occasionally I need to make a post where I defend accusations, otherwise some folks may consider our lack of response as sign of guilt.

Do some folks really believe that we manipulate our scans?
Do some believe we orchestrate and/or tolerate shill bidding in our auctions?

For those who know us, or know me personally, it’s clear that these acts of fraud are simply not in my DNA. For those who don’t know me or PWCC and who choose the conspiracy theory approach, I offer logic to refute these claims. The logic is this… we only clear a couple % on each sale, so we simply don’t have the time or resources to manipulate individual auctions. Not to mention that the risk associated with trying to manipulate an auction is immeasurable; it would destroy our brand and everything I’ve worked hard to accomplish.

Our Scans:
Regarding our scanning, all I can say is that we use the same settings for every card we scan in each auction. Never do we go in and adjust the settings for an individual card. If you don’t like our scans, I suppose you can accuse us of having bad scans, but please forgo the accusation that we are manipulating them artificially. We never receive returns from buyers who felt our scans were inaccurate. In fact, I just checked our return history over the last 12 months and there’s not a single instance where the bidder sights the scan as having been enhanced artificially. What does that tell you? I admit that the settings we used in prior years with old equipment was simply were not universally accurate (in my opinion); sometimes making some issues appear ‘hot’ or overly bright. In our defense, it’s hard to make one group of settings that optimize every card issue from 1888-2014. As technology has improved, so have our scanners and we feel that our current images are extremely accurate. If folks are upset with past images, I sincerely apologize and perhaps those folks prefer our current representations more.

Policing Bidders:
On the topic of bid behavior it’s particularly frustrating to be accused of auction manipulation when I actually feel we are working to improve bidder behavior more than anyone else. It's impossible to watch every auction, but we police the bid as much as we can and have blocked more bidder ids for bad behavior than anyone else I know. As our company has matured we have had various policies come and go, some of which have proven more intelligent than others. For example one program I regret most was from 2009/2010 when we allowed consignors to place a single ‘reserve bid’ on a consigned lot if they received approval from us. This sort of thing was more-or-less accepted back in 2009 and we didn't think anything of it at the time (hidden reserves are still part of the hobby with many auction houses). In hindsight this wasn’t a smart program to have engaged in because it opened the door to abuse. We made a mistake offering this as a service and ended it in 2010. We certainly didn’t want to hurt the hobby and we have not offered this option for over 5 years. This is just an example of where we admit to being imperfect and we sincerely hope folks don’t hold this against us. Every business goes through a maturation and we continue to mature alongside the hobby at large.

eBay & the Hobby
It’s important to remember that eBay is a public auction venue, so when dealing with the public, bidding isn’t always squeaky clean. There are a lot of eccentric behavior in the hobby and it’s not fair to accuse every instance of manipulation. In my experience, 8/10 times something that looks fishy is actually legitimate. Obviously bidder behavior on eBay isn’t perfect, but we are absolutely doing all we can to help improve the marketplace. We hope folks can view accusations that PWCC is somehow the source any bad bidder behavior as illogical; we have nothing to gain and everything to lose from such acts.

So what is PWCC doing to help?
Two weeks ago I was at the 2015 West Coast Seller Summit hosted by eBay where I spoke at length with the eBay’s Trust & Safety team regarding bidder behavior and buyer quality. I am also attending a panel discussion on 6/11 with eBay where I will again be pressing for more seller tools that help us filter and police bidding. This panel discussion will be among 200 eBay employees and I’m one of only 4 sellers who’ve been invited to offer their opinions. In particular I am working to get the following tools implemented:

a) Stricter penalties for bid retractors who don’t follow the prescribed rules
b) Much stricter penalties for users with unpaid items on their record
c) IP address monitoring to ensure two or more accounts are never placing bids on the same item
d) Contact information cross checks to ensure bad users are not able to create new accounts
e) Stricter policies on how bidders with prior bad behavior are allowed to return to bidding (.i.e. forced instant payment with vetted credit cards on file, etc)
f) Seller tools that allow us to specify which bidders are allowed to bid (relative to the number and type of infraction listed above).

*Does anyone have other ideas that I could forward on to eBay? How can we make eBay the most trusted sale environment on the internet? Please help us make it better and post your thoughts to this thread.

I again ask that folks be constructive in their comments and I will indeed follow up in a week to review all posts and issue replies where needed. We appreciate everyone’s feedback.

Brent Huigens
PWCC Auctions, LLC
brent@pwccauctions.com