Posting eBay auction links: what's your opinion?

[ForresterModern]

Chas, I am not sure anybody used the descriptor "rife" with regards to schill bidding practices (I believe I said a few times), and I recognize that ebay over the years has become much more sophisticated, but only because either they or the customers (who reported it) realized that they were being duped ort the system manipulated. I have been on ebay for over 10 years and this has been a slow evolution, so my experiences may no longer be the case, but that does not mean they do not still happen. Rules get set, people figure out the loopholes in the system and exploit them, then rules get changed to force compliance, then new loopholes are discovered. It is far from a perfect system, albeit getting to be a very complicated one to navigate as a seller anymore.
But I definitely remember one bicycle I was bidding on several years ago where after the first few bids by various members it came down to myself and a johnny-come-lately bidder the last 24 hours, parrying back and forth with the price of the bike going up from that point at around $400 to a final win price of over $800 by "johnny". The very next morning I get a notice from the seller that the buyer "johnny" had reneged and I got the "second chance offer" to buy the bike at my last bid of somewhere in the high $700 range. After thinking about it, and reviewing the bidding, I refused the offer and countered with an offer of what my first bid was after "johnny" entered the fray, somewhere in the mid $400 range, and I explained why, but the seller refused that second chance reply. Within 48 hours the bike was back up for auction again (it was a very unique bike and the same vendor), johnny showed up again and placed one late bid a few hours before the item closed but no more, and the item actually sold for less than what I had offered as my "second chance" price. Turns out that the seller had filed a "non-paying buyer" claim against the johnny in order to get out of the sellers fees from the first failed transaction and to list the bike again for free but then went back and dropped the complaint against johnny before the re-list auction was finished (otherwise johnny would not have been able to bid again on much of anything, let alone this same seller's same item). I let ebay know and they investigated and responded eventually to me that it was in their opinion a schill bidder although they could not verify a direct link between the two, other than the fact that johnny was bidding on a lot of items from that particular seller and not on much else, and that despite at least one other reneged auction payment to the same seller johnny had not gotten negative feedback on either of the two auctions. Needless to say, johnny disappeared shortly thereafter, although the seller maintained his membership at least for a little while longer. So eBay has had a long learning curve and things were not always so perfect.

I still shop, seek, and buy things off ebay regularly, mainly because with name brand items the quality is known and standardized and you can often get the same thing cheaper than retail or even online stores using a price-based search engine. One-off and used items, however, can be a crapshoot based on the honesty of the seller and description of the item, as even photos do not always demonstrate the true condition or value of many items.

But I certainly do not have any problem with people posting a thread about something they saw on ebay in some forum whether I am bidding on the item or not. I know what value I would place on the item, and if interested I bid that amount, but if it is valued by another bidder at a higher price and I lose the auction, I am rarely disappointed.