Pictures in eBay auctions

[thecatspajamas]

Originally Posted by smotan_02

Good catch, so would people see this as a good business practice or unethical? I guess eBay is really the only place where I can set up two shops with the expressed intent of making my other shop looking like a bargain. This pretty much seals the deal that I dont want to do business with this guy. Plus that is a lot of duplicate listing fees for the sake of making one item look better over another.

I don't know whether it would be ethical or not, but it certainly doesn't seem like the most cost-effective business practice. Especially if you're using the exact same photo for the listing in both stores. On unique items, it's going to be painfully obvious what is going on (as it turned out to be with this ticket), and for items with enough examples out there for the identical photos to be obscured in the mass, the effectiveness of one high-priced example added to the mix is questionable. Seems to me that the better way to go would be to list it once, at the higher price, with a Best Offer option and accept any offers down to the lower selling price or anywhere in between.

In the interest of full-disclosure, I have on occasion doubled up listings like this between two accounts, but only to take advantage of the occasional "free listing day" promotion by eBay (which are not always available to both Store subscribers and non-Store subscribers at the same time). In the end though, it just caused too much confusion for some buyers, even after I explained what I was doing, to be worth the savings in listing fees.