PWCC & eBay - help us improve the hobby

[Rob D.]

This is a hobby in which loyalty is pledged -- much too often and by people who should know better -- to whomever bought them dinner at a National. If Brent does nothing else, he should just make sure he has reservations at Morton's the last week in July.

R0b D3wolf

[Peter_Spaeth]

Originally Posted by Rob D.

This is a hobby in which loyalty is pledged -- much too often and by people who should know better -- to whomever bought them dinner at a National. If Brent does nothing else, he should just make sure he has reservations at Morton's the last week in July.

R0b D3wolf

Seems all you have to do to win most people over is ship their card quickly and securely.

[chaddurbin]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

Seems all you have to do to win most people over is ship their card quickly and securely.

i'm happy with the free catalog that i didn't have to provide two hobby references for.

[Brent Huigens]

Fellow collectors,

Thank you for your responses to this thread and for providing suggestions for both improving eBay and for improving PWCC Auctions. I have separated our responses into two sections. The first provides my responses to your feedback about improving PWCC Auctions. The second provides my approach to incorporating your feedback in my conversations with eBay later this week.

I have said before that I try to limit my involvement in message boards in order to ensure an open, uninfluenced discussion. As such, I don’t plan to revisit this thread. If you have follow up questions or feedback, please send to me by email (brent@pwccauctions.com).

Thank you,

Brent Huigens
PWCC Auctions
brent@pwccauctions.com


Section 1: Feedback to improve PWCC Auctions:

Concerns over consignor-issued reserves in 2009-10

Raised by swarmee, wonkaticket, calvindog, Jantz, ullmandds

This was first discussed several years ago on this and the Net54 message boards. The reserve option was a highly restrictive service we offered over a narrow period of time, ending in 2010. It was used by very few consignors because our requirements were strict:

1. Consignors had to get PWCC approval to place reserve bids in advance
2. The reserve amount had to be conservative relative to the market value (also required approval)
3. The consignor still had to pay our fees, as well as eBay, in the event that the reserve was not met.

I estimate that no more than 100 (perhaps has few as 50) reserves were ever placed in 2009-10 and the vast majority were eclipsed by the bidding. Not making excuses for this program because we regret having it, but it was never used to wrong bidders, eBay, or the hobby.

Concerns over the cost of shipping, our approach to packaging, and recommendations to use FedEx rather than USPS

Raised by begsu1013

In order to keep shipping costs low, we use a packaging approach which includes multiple layers of envelopes. This includes a bubble mailer and a rigid outer envelope. This approach was developed over a decade of optimizing our shipping. We feel this approach results in not only an appropriate cost but also is very effective in protecting cards. Complaints of damage in shipping are extraordinarily rare.

We ship USPS because they offer the lowest rates. Generally speaking, most buyers prefer low cost over speed. We offer shipping through FedEx if buyers request it. Items over $3k are shipped USPS registered due to its unmatched safety and security.

Suggestions that we stop selling Christmas Rack Packs in our Auctions due to concerns over their legitimacy

Raised by Bbeck

We have discussed this internally and ultimately agree with the feedback from this and other boards. As such, we will no longer broker Christmas Rack Packs in our auctions, starting with Auction #6. Out of respect for our consignors who have already submitted these items to our current auction, we will sell the items we have already in house.

Concerns about bid manipulation (shilling)

Raised by Peter_Spaeth, Swarmee, Calvindog

9 times out of 10, bidding behavior that appears suspicious is actually legitimate, and just the result of eccentric bid behavior by trusted and proven users. However, we acknowledge there is still room for improvement which was the reason I started this thread; please refer to the next section of this post which summarizes the recommendations I intend to make to eBay to increase transparency in bidding and seller’s ability to limit bids from eBay users with prior bad behavior.

I encourage folks to contact me regarding any auction which they feel shows signs of suspicious behavior at brent@pwccauctions.com. I will always investigate and respond to these inquires. We very much appreciate everyone’s time in helping us police the market place.

Questions about the settings we use in our scanning process

Raised by Sean1125, Bbcemporium, Peter_Spaeth

Our goal with scanning is to make the card appear as close to its actual appearance as possible. We are not trying to enhance the appearance of the cards – this would not be in our best interest because we would end up with unhappy buyers, returned items, and a damaged brand.

We use an image size of 150 dpi because we feel this size is most representative of how the card looks when you are actually holding it in your hand. In special circumstances (high value, unique issues, etc.) we can and do provide higher resolution scans upon request.

Suggestion to list who consigned each item

Raised by glchen, Swarmee

This would deviate from the basic principles of a consignment-based business, though we understand the logic behind the suggestion.

Suggestion to ask the collecting community to police our auctions for bid manipulation and inauthentic items

Raised by Glchen

Yes! I often ask the hobby community to help us police our auctions, and welcome anyone who identifies perceived impropriety to bring it to our attention by email (brent@pwccauctions.com). In fact, a recent post on the Blowout Cards message board alerted us to an inauthentic item we had listed in Auction #5 yesterday. Based in part from the feedback from this message board, we ended the auction.

Suggestion to develop our own auction platform for PWCC and detach from eBay

Raised by irishdenny, swarmee

eBay is the largest market in the world. It is not broken, but we agree with many of the contributors to this post that there is room for improvement. We want to focus on improving an already highly functional venue rather than starting from scratch on our own platform. That said, should eBay make policy changes that we all feel undermine the needs of the hobby, we will absolutely make the move towards independence.

Question about whether we ever offered to waive sales tax for California auction winners if they paid by check?

Raised by calvindog

Yes, we offered this option to CA buyers in 2013/2014 until our move to Oregon at the start of this year. The State of CA was always paid the sales tax they were owed for all items shipped to CA buyers. This program was very expensive at times for us, but in 2013 our plans to relocate to Oregon were already in place, so we knew the program would be temporary. Bottom line, CA is a large market and we wanted CA based bidders involved in our auctions.

Because of our volume, we were audited by the CA Board of Equalization who reviewed all our transactions to CA buyers since 2009. It was concluded that we were in full compliance.


Section 2: Feedback to improve the service provided by eBay:

Suggestions to restore bidder usernames in bid history and enabling sellers to restrict bidding for things like unpaid items, bid retractions, and low feedback

Raised by swarmee, glchen

We agree about restoring bid history and usernames. It makes it difficult to ask the community to police bidding when usernames are truncated. In our opinion, more important than providing bidder IDs is providing a Bidder Defect Report, summarizing things like number of bid retractions, number of unpaid items, etc.

If such a report is created, eBay should also put in place the ability for sellers to enable or disable bidders based on certain metrics in the Bidder Defect Report. For example, sellers could then prohibit bidders who have a certain number of bid retractions, prohibit bidders who have a certain number of unpaid items, restrict buyers who have low feedback from bidding on all items or on selected items.

Right now, eBay does not have the functionality to allow sellers to do these things. This is one of my main suggestions to eBay.

Comments about seller’s ability to address negative feedback

Raised by Slidekellyslide

We agree that the feedback system needs revision, and the good news is that eBay agrees wholeheartedly. We will all soon see improvements to how feedback is treated. Generally speaking it is the belief of eBay that feedback should play a smaller role in marketplace.

Suggestion that eBay consider offering extended auction durations to enable more potential bidders to see items

Raised by glchen

We agree that the short durations can be a limitation. To address these concerns, eBay recently enabled 10-day duration auctions for free. It’s possible that they would consider longer auction durations in the future, but ultimately the need for long durations is a Catalog Auction invention, needed because auctions on those platforms are infrequent and bidders need time to find the items. Ebay has items closing 24 hours a day so the need for long auctions is less pronounced in our opinion.

Suggestion that eBay consider limiting the number of bids placed on an item by an individual bidder

Raised by tombocombo, DerekMichael

This is an interesting suggestion and worth discussing. In our experience, 9 times out of 10, mass bidding is not a sign of manipulation, but rather a symptom of competitive and often eccentric good bidders. So while mass bidding on a single item is certainly annoying, it’s rarely a sign of fraud.

Regardless, we agree this is a good suggestion and there may be some limits eBay could consider. We will bring it up.

Answers to specific questions raised by Swarmee

Raised by swarmee

1. How often are items for certain sellers not paid for? If that number is over 10% (or on large $$ items), that would be a sign to me that shill accounts are being used and then stiffed, so that the “buyer” doesn’t have to fork over cash to buy back their own card. They know you’ll relist the card during your next auction.

Great question, and a great metric to track. We do track this particularly for new consignors. In our opinion, a threshold of 10% is actually far too high. Returns and unpaid items are very rare. From an entire monthly auction, we only have about 1% of items go unpaid. For us, if a single consignor has more than 2 unpaid items, we research the buyers and bid history in search of suspicious behavior.

2. Does your staff actively cross-check buyer addresses with consignor addresses of the same cards? Are they kept in the same line on your spreadsheet/database where they could be easily queried to see if your consigners are winning back their items?

Yes, we absolutely cross-check buyer addresses with consignor addresses for all items. This is an easy check for us with the tools we use.

3. If the top bidder does not pay, do you offer to underbidders? If so, this would also spur shill bidding. You could make a policy that you will never make offers to underbidders. Most bidders are wary of receiving “2nd chance” offers, figuring they were bid up in the first place.

No, we don’t offer items to underbidders because the second-chance offer process is highly inefficient and rarely honored by underbidders (partly for reasons you highlight). Important to note that these items are then relisted in the next auction. All bidders who fail to pay for an item in our auctions are blocked from bidding on our account.

4. Can you block/suspend all user accounts with over 5 bid retractions in the course of 6 months and all related (same IP, address) accounts? This would help cut down on overbidding to identify someone’s top bid, and then backing out.

We will be asking eBay to formulate a Bidder Defect Report (see description above) and ask them to start policing IP addresses to identify suspicious bid behavior. Bid retractions can be both legal and illegal, and it’s the illegal type which don’t follow eBay guidelines that we’d like to see treated more harshly.

[Peter_Spaeth]

"Yes, we offered this option to CA buyers in 2013/2014 until our move to Oregon at the start of this year. The State of CA was always paid the sales tax they were owed for all items shipped to CA buyers. This program was very expensive at times for us, but in 2013 our plans to relocate to Oregon were already in place, so we knew the program would be temporary. Bottom line, CA is a large market and we wanted CA based bidders involved in our auctions."

I am glad to hear you paid 8.25 percent sales tax even if you didn't collect it, meaning you must have lost money on each of those transactions ("we only clear a couple % on each sale"), but curiously the invoice I have seen instructing the winner how to avoid sales tax is dated 2011.

[calvindog]

PWCC tells us that it was so concerned about losing California bidders because of the law which requires the CA auction winners to pay 8.25% sales tax -- that because PWCC was planning on moving to Oregon at the beginning of 2015 anyway, PWCC would offer to pay the 8.25% sales tax on any auction wins by CA residents in 2013-14, thus losing money on sales to any CA resident for this relatively short period of time (1-2 years).

Except PWCC never advertised this in its listings, never telling CA bidders it wanted to keep their business by paying the sales tax for the auction winners -- thus the very bidders PWCC wanted to keep were never told of this wonderful program in place courtesy of PWCC's generosity;

Except PWCC was sending out invoices in 2011, not 2013-14, telling CA winners it could avoid CA sales tax -- which means Brent would have us believe that he took a loss on every single win by a CA resident from 2011 through 2014 (and putting the lie to what Brent wrote last night, that he offered to pay the sales tax starting in 2013);

Except PWCC never told CA winners that PWCC would be paying the CA sales tax for them -- instead it included in its invoices the language that CA winners could avoid sales tax if they would "1) Provide a valid CA resale license, or 2) Pay by check or money order." If I'm a CA auction winner who is paying by check or money order how am I not still liable for the sales tax? Nowhere did Brent say in his listings or invoices that HE would be paying the sales tax, thus removing the liability to the auction winners.

This story is ludicrous.

[Peter_Spaeth]

From a 2011 auction listing.

"Sales Tax 8.25% charged to some California buyers. We encourage CA buyers to contact us before bidding.

brent@pwccauctions.com 805-440-8903"

I guess you can draw whatever inference you want.