Originally posted by JeffJS If you suspect you've been price-jacked by a shill bidder, don't pay for the item and report it to ebay. What is the seller going to do? Leave negative feedback? Woops, Can't do that anymore. Don't want to pay more than something is worth? Don't place a bid where you could be driven to that price.
Jeff, I think you are missing the point. I'm not saying Ebay is a bad place and all sellers are bad, or that there is a conspiracy going on. Its just a simple trick I've seen happen. I don't condone it either, as its not in the spirit of things. The seller will be fine with taking the item back into their inventory to resell it again.
Why would the seller want to complain to Ebay? It would just raise Ebay's attention to odd auction price history patterns. The point of the shill bidding to a reserve price is so a seller can keep the item if no one will buy it at the seller's perceived fair value.
It would be short sighted for a seller to just bid like Topsy on his own auction to try to max out the price. Ebay would detect it sooner or later and the seller would get banned.
As mentioned before, the problem is that you are guaranteed to not get a bargain when a seller does this.
Thanks for the information on setting up a second Ebay account, thats one to bear in mind if I get around to buying and trying more lenses as I think it helps to sell things out of a different account to the one used for buying. Previously though, I was refering to the practice of attempting to sell the same kit from different Ebay accounts after shilling results in an item not being sold.
Last edited by whojammyflip; 08-15-2010 at 11:47 AM.