PWCC – Announcing Formal Policy Concerning eBay Bidder & Buyer Integrity

[Brent Huigens]

Thank you all for your thoughts, comments, and questions. I have been closely watching your reactions to our original post and I’m replying now to answer the questions that were raised. This will be our last post on this thread. If you have further questions, or have feedback you’d like to share, please send an email directly to me (betsy@pwccauctions.com) or to our bid monitoring email address (bidmonitoring@pwccauctions.com).

Questions concerning our ability to enforce our Bid Retraction Policy

Retractions on PWCC items:

Just like other sellers on eBay, we are notified real-time when a bid is retracted on our auctions. We review the issue and take action daily.

• First Offense: When a bidder retracts their first bid with PWCC, we report it and a warning is issued by eBay.
• Second Offense: Should a second retraction occur on our account, that bidder will have their bidding privileges revoked by eBay for a period of 14 days.
• Third Offense: Should a third retraction occur on our account, that bidder will have their account suspended by eBay.

Total number of bid retractions eBay-wide:

For each occurrence of a bid retraction, as well as through various spot checks of our listings, we take note of the total number of bid retractions that a particular user ID has on their account eBay-wide. We take action based on the following approach:

• When a bidder has between 0-9 bid retractions in the last six months, we log When a bidder has between 10-24 bid retractions in the last six months, we send a warning message outlining the fact that bidders who show 25+ bid retractions in the last six months will be blocked from participating in PWCC auctions
• When a bidder has 25 or more bid retractions in the last six months, we block that user ID from participating in PWCC auctions

As pointed out by many of you, 25 is indeed a very high number of bid retractions to be considered reasonable in a six-month period. It stands to reason that any bidder who is bidding with discipline and control should have very few justifiable retractions. Brent and I put great consideration on how we would roll out this process. Truly, if we placed the threshold at something lower like 10 or 5, we feared it would be too much of a drastic change. Ultimately, our goal is not to punish bidders, but rather to inform users of the rules as we believe in due time bid retractions will diminish.

We are starting with 25 as the threshold to help get the word out. Starting in Q1 2017 it will be reduced to 10, and later in 2017 it may be reduced to 5.

Questions about the definition of String Bidding:

As highlighted by many of you, simply placing a series of sequential bids is not string bidding. We understand the logistics of bidding on eBay, particularly using eBay’s app which actually makes it easiest to place minimum bids, and we understand that many bidders place a series of sequential bids for completely legitimate reasons.

Here’s why placing a series of bids at the minimum bid increment can be problematic:

Let's assume there are two bidders interested in a listing. Bidder A is the high bidder at $6,000, but has a maximum bid of $7350. Bidder B places a bid of $6,100, and eBay raises the bid to $6,200. Bidder B bids $6,300 and eBay raises the bid to $6,400, and so on. Finally, when Bidder B bids $7,300, eBay raises the bid to $7,350 (not $7,400) thereby ‘outing’ bidder A’s max bid. This essentially allowed Bidder B to increase the bidding to Bidder A’s max bid while greatly reducing the likelihood that they became the high bidder themselves (50/50 odds). We will remain patient on this topic as it’s NOT our primary concern (bid retractions and unpaid items are far larger issues), but we do hope to limit string bidding and will contact users who seem to employ this behavior.

Two important notes:

1. Most troubling is when there is an instance of string bidding paired with a bid retraction. A bidder that engages in this behavior has and will be blocked from participating in PWCC auctions and will be reported to eBay. We have a zero tolerance on obviously manipulative behavior and string bidding paired with a retraction is considered highly manipulative.

2. String bidding which ultimately results in that user ID becoming the high bidder (eventually) will not be flagged by PWCC as this clearly suggests that the string bidder has real intention to win the item.

Since implementing our policies here are some statistics:

• PWCC has blocked 92 user IDs for having 25+ bid retractions in the last six months and contacted those bidders in hopes they will refrain from retracting bids moving forward
• PWCC has reached out to 62 user IDs for having between 10-24 bid retractions in the last six months
• PWCC has reached out to 54 user IDs to explain our position on string bidding
• PWCC has blocked 16 user IDs due to malicious string bidding combined with a retraction
• eBay has sent warning messages to 375 user IDs (we've been logging bid retractions for the past 8 months)
• eBay has suspended bidding across eBay for 14 days for three user IDs for their second bid retraction
• To date eBay has not taken the step to suspend any IDs but will do so for a bidder who retracts their third bid with PWCC

Please contact me directly (betsy@pwccauctions.com) with any questions, comments, or feedback. Thank you!