PWCC – Announcing Formal Policy Concerning eBay Bidder & Buyer Integrity

[Peter_Spaeth]

I fail to see the "issue" with sniping.

[ALR-bishop]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

I fail to see the "issue" with sniping.

+ 1

I almost always snipe, but have on occasion bid in increments until I am the high bidder or find that the high bid is higher than I want to pay. If I never retract ( and I don't), I would think that should be ok

25 retractions is too high a threshold , by at least 20... unless the purpose is to give folks who have clearly been bidding inappropriately a second chance going forward with the new criteria.

Still, I view this as a positive development

[jim]

hi Brent, currently, in your auction (http://www.ebay.com/itm/1935-Goudey-...-/351861695474), your high bidder has 3 bid retractions in the last 6 months while the underbidder has 9 bid retractions in the last 6 months. Does anything need to be done with these two bidders? thanks,
Jim Loewke

[tschock]

Originally Posted by jim

hi Brent, currently, in your auction (http://www.ebay.com/itm/1935-Goudey-...-/351861695474), your high bidder has 3 bid retractions in the last 6 months while the underbidder has 9 bid retractions in the last 6 months. Does anything need to be done with these two bidders? thanks,
Jim Loewke

"We have to establish a starting point, so to start any user ID we identify that has greater than 25 bid retractions over the last six months will be blocked from participating in PWCC auctions. Any user ID we identify with between 10 and 25 retractions will be notified of our policy and warned. In time, we plan to reduce the allowed number of retractions to 10, and perhaps as low as 5. Note: a user’s bid retraction count is not a statistic we can automatically filter; we appreciate the help of the collecting community in identifying user IDs which show quantities beyond our defined limits."

Not to jump on your post as not useful (it is), but I think you provided a good example to support PWCC's position of STARTING with 25 and reducing over time. I would expect that for PWCC to start at 5 (as some would suggest) would become an administrative nightmare and the whole impetus would become a non-starter.

It seems to me that PWCC is doing much of the 'heavy lifting' here with the 'blessing' of ebay. Just because PWCC is taking the initiative doesn't mean that the retract-a-holics won't be going elsewhere.

[jim]

you are right Taylor; thanks for the note. i will not be bidding in this auction going forward though.
jim

[D. Bergin]

Let's be blunt with the bid retractions. You can't control these people on the rest of Ebay, you can only stop them in their tracks from doing it in your own auctions.

It's obvious a lot of the heavy hitters have been using bid retractions as part of their bidding strategy for awhile now. This is not a myth, it's not a unicorn...it has been happening, and frequently.

One guy has admitted here on Net54, and there's tons out there who won't say a word about it, but also do the same.

PWCC doesn't want to throw these guys out with the bathwater and crater their own auctions in the process. They are creating a starting point, to hopefully get the word out, help curtail their practices outside of PWCC and maybe reign them in a little at a time down the road.

It's great to see them doing any kind of policing. The absolute simplest thing would be for Ebay to do it on a software level, sitewide.......but that might cost the bosses at the top a few pennies off their bonus checks, so we will likely never see it from them.

It's sad that Ebay is making one of their best customers do their police work for them.......and I'm saying this as somebody who has never, ever bid in a PWCC auction.