eBay Faces 'Vertical' Setback amid Shill Bidding Scandal

by: pace306

"sellers are UNreliable sources of income and he meant it."

Because also (as well), sellers (most smaller ones) dont have multiples of the same hot items.

Most smaller sellers have "deals" on the single items they aquire - and its certainly true in most categories.

Whether or not you source goods from liquidators or fleamarkets or garage sales - alot of times theres only 1 or 2 of said item.

When you "NEED" 10 million dollar salaries, when you need to keep Walkers West fully stocked in wings and booze (a famous eBay past time) ... yours or my 1 or 2 items cant make that happen.

eBay offers FANTASTIC perks to employees - free EVERYTHING and someone has to pay for it! Its not going to come out of corporate profits .. so .... smaller sellers it is.

Now if eBay had the brains of a cockroach - they would WORK with sellers instead of against them - but thats not going to happen here. Sellers are enemy #1 (though there are some here that give high credence to the lip service eBay puts out as being a partner and being helpful)(all we do, we do for YOU) ... oops TO you! ... but I digress.

That period (btw) was the very first days of the Evil Reign Of VERO The First". Its when verowatch.com, nrg.com (both no longer functioning) and others were unleashed against sellers who "were not recognized by manufacturers")(no such law/rule in US commerce). When you chase away sellers who seller 1s and 2s of a product and replace them with the maker who gets a free Platinum store ... then you CAN get consistant FVF and the large makers ARE reliable sources of income!

%99 of what happens in todays eBay is BS and lies - they have to - theres no choice. They go from scheme to scheme, from falsehood to falsehood, and from get rich quick scheme to get rich quick scheme - instead of just supporting the very people (sellers) who support them and pay the bills.

(in the cases of people like Skullcandy, they emptied their warehouses of all the junk, collected email addresses and then promptly left), but it seems that eBay has yet to learn a thing or two about how the world REALLY works ... (dopes).

PSST - eBay employees - my info is public record should you want to select another target :)

by: BackOff

I know for a fact that some big eBay sellers here in San Diego are shill bidding on their own listings. One of them sells a lot of jewelry and antiques. While I was at a local swap meet he showed me a guitar he was selling on eBay and then told me to “hold on for second” because he had to place a shill bid on his listing to increase the sale.

Another San Diego seller that pretended to be nice to me at a local sale turned out to be a dirty two-faced scumbag. He frequently sells art, jewelry and antiques and is likely a shill bidder that artificially decreases prices of items to target competitors. He does almost all auctions and was selling a Contax medium format, Nikon cameras and batteries recently. Years ago, I was selling rare annual reports for $125 each (I sold 10 of them to one buyer). A couple months later, the seller tried to undercut me by listing the same items for $9.99 each in order to artificially reduce the prices of these items. Needless to say, I have continued to get $60-100 each for these reports for the past 5 years.  

by: itsjustasprain

You won't find me in your auction until 5 seconds from the end, when I'll slam in a single best-price bid, and either win it or not. Shill bidding generally reveals itself long before then.

There's no sense bidding on Tuesday in an auction that doesn't end until Thursday. All you do that way is give nibble bidders and shills a chance to push your final price higher and higher, even if they don't exceed it.

P.S. One comment regarding the pharmacist selling fake vaccination cards: maybe my career in the printing industry has given me a more expert view, but anyway: these vaccination cards are dead simple to make at home, with absolutely no security features. It's trivial to make your own by either scanning another or knocking one together in Word, printing it on lightweight cardstock, and scribbling some official-looking notations on it.

They were (at least originally) intended for record-keeping purposes only, not as some sort of universal access card. People or organizations actually taking them as proof of vaccination are kidding themselves (though at the same time, I will admit that there's no official mechanism for verifying vaccination status or documents even if they wanted to, outside of doing their own medical testing to check for antibodies). Anyone managing to sell fake ones has chutzpah, but doesn't need many other skills.