I've been buying and successfully selling on eBay for years, but this week I uncovered something that really brought home to me how little Ebay does to protect its sellers from problematic buyers
I had an item for sale with a starting bid of £4.99. One bid was received, and this was subsequently retracted by the buyer. The reason given was 'wrong amount entered' - fair enough we can all make mistakes, but when I looked, the amount entered had been £5.00 so in effect the buyer had bid only 1p more than my minimum.
I'm not unsympathetic at all and well appreciate that sometimes people's finances can change, but something made me look at the buyers profile in a little more detail and I discovered that in the last 30 days, despite having 100% feedback this buyer had retracted 25 bids and 199 in the last 6 months.
Surely buyers like this should be banned. In a real world auction house behaviour like this would not be tolerated and it begs the question why does Ebay collect information if they are unwilling to act on it or share it more openly. I reported the buyer as a serial bid retractor and received a very sympathetic hearing plus an assurance that appropriate action would be taken. Of course 'data protection' prevented them from telling me what they were going to do, but I know absolutely that he/she hasn't been banned because I have just received a message from him/her apologising for the mistaken bid retraction and asking if he/she can bid again!!