Ending Ebay Auctions Early

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Posted By: warshawlaw

I've rarely if ever asked a seller to end an item early but I find myself doing it routinely now as a consequence of there being more and more people who troll the listings looking for naive sellers and offering them fractions of the value of their items to end auctions. When I see something I really want, I have no remaining compunctions about offering the seller a decent price for it to end the auction. If I get the item, great. If not, then at the very least, when one of those bottom feeders comes along the seller won't end the auction and give him a steal. Sometimes it works out even better than I hoped. I recently sent a seller an offer on an item that I felt was fair market value just to alert him to the fact that the item was valuable. He did not end the item for me and I got it at auction for less than my offer and well under my highest bid price.