Be Excellent To Each Other

2010, dude.

That's a lot of records.

Them and Blizzard.

Exactly what do you think they (or anyone else) are going do with your precious name, date of birth and email address?

Suck off tramps while shouting "I AM <insert name>! I WAS BORN ON <insert date of birth>!" in between foetid mouthfuls.

Fuck, good point.

Well, apart from that?

There is absolutely no point in bidding till the last 10 seconds any more. I would say that over the last 6 months that the amount of people who watch an average auction has doubled, you get your main influx of watchers bang on a day before the auction ends so I'm assuming some sort of script.

Put bundle in the title and sell in lots of no less than three items, add in one shit item with two good ones.

I think they're going to sell them, cause me to get spammed even more, and come the revolution executed for watching tranny porn or something.

Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of passwords. Surely the site needs your username and password in order to bid on your behalf? (which links in to the password thread). I'd rather not trust a third party with it. They could be doing anything with it.

(And in the blizzard/real-name case, I don't want an employee googling for my name and finding me being a grade A knob on some forum somewhere)

Grrr... here's something to watch out for. Bid retractions.

My Alien Facehugger was up to £195 earlier when all of a sudden, it dropped back to £46 (serves me right for gloating). Two of the highest bidders had retracted their bids stating they inputted the wrong amount. Both bids were pretty unique and not followed up with proper bids.

A quick Google seems to suggest that they put bids in to see what the maximum amount is and then retract them so they can save their proper bid till the last minute. It's annoying as the artificially high price may have put off proper buyers in the mean time.

The sooner an alternative to eBay appears, the better.

If a viable alternative to ebay does appear, ebay will buy it for $squillion and quietly shut it down.

WTF?! Never heard of that kind of bullshit before.

Can't you sell it to WTB now for £50 though?

He's welcome to it for that much... He might be able to do something about the fleas it has and the poo round it's bottom.

It's happened again on something else I'm selling! Someone put a bid in and retracted it two hours later stating that I'd "changed the item description"

This is why I never list auction style. Always buy it now with immediate payment.

There used to be a stat on a user profile that showed how many bid retractions someone had put in recently so you could either block them from budding on your auctions if you wanted, or report them for trying to game the system.

Amazon Marketplace. Stick it on for £100 - I'm sure someone will buy it.

The fees are bigger than eBay, but it's saves the heartache of using fleBay.

It's back up to £177.50 now...

I'm not holding my breath for it to stay there.

Ebay should let the seller pull the trigger at any time on whatever is the current highest bid. Would stop this practice, and would encourage people away from last minute bid-sniping, too.

Yeah, I'm just testing the water.

Would you believe it? Another bid retraction!

They bid £198 and withdrew it 2 minutes later. It looks like the highest bidder now is £175 but I'm not entirely sure it'll stay that way.

This guy has had his bid in since the 8th August so if he is going to retract it, he's saving it until the last minute for maximum effect.

I'm surprised they don't have something in their rules about bid retractions, they should suspend the accounts of serial offenders or something.

Just proves that all Aliens fans are cunts.

@MarkG The thing is they do have something in their rules. Ebay state that people should put a new bid in straight away and they will take action on people with more than a certain amount of retractions.

In practice, all they do is ignore them.

I was under the impression that to retract a bid I had to get the seller's permission.

With the knowledge that I can just press a button and have it automagically retracted I'm going to go out and game the system to the max, yo! I'm surprised the sniping software doesn't do it for you.

Amazon Marketplace.

eBay means you don't have to take the extra seconds to type out a price when you're selling it.

I just click the 'Match Current Lowest Price' button.

We're all at it today!

I've just had an email about one of my items that reads:-



The cheek of some people! What do you think I should go back with?

"Add 20% and you've got a deal".

Draw me a Unicorn.

"no"

Davpaz wins.

I've gone back to say that there's loads of people watching it so it's not fair to end it early.

The Alien Facehugger went for £177.50.. The winner hasn't paid yet but I remain slightly optimistic*

*Not optimistic at all.

Ebay don’t do enough for fraudsters, they will force somebody selling a slot machine to remove the pay-out mechanism but are slow to react to fraud.

My best mate has an IT company and has branched out into video conferencing, he found a guy selling some equipment. The guy said he would deliver it but my mate wanted to see it. There was excuse after excuse including him saying he lived on the Hebrides! It was obvious the seller had no equipment. He called Ebay and they did fuck all

Never had any problems buying or selling really, if I have high value stuff then I insist on COD as this ensures people are happy and you don’t get the Pay Pal hassle of people forcing you into disputes.

The fees are high along with Pay Pal, but I generally sell things that are just lying around the house and that I don’t want so even with the fees it’s worth it. For buying I find it really good especially for garden stuff which is a lot cheaper that Homebase.

The worse thing that happened to me was I bid on a Vegas slot for £150 and won it. My wife wouldn’t let me have it in the house so it lived in the garage.2 years later when I went to sell it I found that it had been turned off too long and a CMOS type battery in it had drained. You could fix it but it involved pissing around ordering parts on US forums, soldering and dumping the game ram. I couldn’t be bothered and put it on EBay as not working. It went for 99p

Remember the highest bidder on my blinkin' Alien Facehugger? Well, he's emailed me to say the following:-



I think he means that he didn't want to spend any more than £100 on it, why he bid £177 I don't know? Anyway, I've emailed him back to say tough titty. You pay me the full amount or I go to the next highest bidder (who probably won't want it either)

So. What have we learned?

I'm not really sure. I knew it would be a pain to sell them so I was expecting some hassle.. Never use eBay I guess?

Or that the majority of eBay users are tyre kickers? Either way... annoying.

Have you thought about Amazon Marketplace, where the money goes into your account before you even know it's been sold?

TV, I have heard Amazon Marketplace is good for this sort of thing. Not sure where I heard it though.

I heard that you don't even have to bother with prices on there, but like you.. I don't know where I heard it.

Am I right in thinking that you can only list stuff on Amazon Marketplace if it's something in their inventory? So, an Alien Facehugger which isn't in their inventory, can't be sold on there?

You can, but I believe you need a barcode that isn't used for anything else, so one you've generated or one for something like an issue of a magazine (as they don't sell magazines) so you can set up a product that way. I think that's how it works, anyway, as I'm sure I remember someone (Derek?) asking for magazine barcodes for amazon listings once.

I would list on a buy it now at £150 with the immediate paypal box ticked.

I've never had a problem buying or selling stuff on eBay

Fuck me. Unbelievable bad luck TheVision. I've had plenty of similar luck with individuals - one at a time - over many years of using eBay, but never has anything I've sold attracted such a large number of fucking arseholes.

There was a golden era when people respected other eBay users and everything was good. At this point, just like everything else on the internet, it's overrun with fucking morons who simply don't fear anything. See Twitter and racist abuse. See Xbox Live, YouTube comments.

Back in the day I wouldn't have dreamed of bidding on something I couldn't afford lest the internet police locked me away. These people don't give a shit, plain and simple.

Likewise, except for the guy that pulled out of buying my MR2 last week.

What excuse did he give?

"My mate's done a check on it and found out that it's category C, thanks for wasting my time."

(it isn't, and never has been. Turned out to be an apparent typo, with his friend saying in a topic on an MR2 forum that it had "unrecorded damage" which his phone supposedly autocorrected to "in recorded damage."

It ended at £2,800 - if the relist ends up selling for less than that, I'm going to be well pissed off - even 2.8K is a billy bargain for a 1998 Rev5 turbo.