Dumb Seller Story - Just For The Heck Of It

No real reason except I find this kind of humorous.

A couple weeks ago, while searching for ebay treasures, I came across a overpriced Junior International album with a lot of stamps in it. The seller not being a dealer or anything to do with stamps, took 5 of his 12 ebay pictures just of the book. And the rest of the pictures showed nothing to speak of. Just a couple random pages.

Within the listing were about 50 links to more pictures that took you to a photo hosting site. There was no album to click "next" or "back" on the site so in order to view all the pictures, you have to go back to the listing and click the next link, one at a time.

I looked through maybe 10-15 pictures and still didn't see anything so I just added it to my watch list and moved on.

A week later, while drinking my morning coffee, I went back again. At this point it had ended with no bids and was relisted for the same price. I looked through some more of the pics and actually found 3 pics that showed some promise. Quite a bit of promise actually. Auction with no bids still had 6 days to go so I messaged the seller asking if he'd do a Buy it Now on it.

I expected him to drop the price a bit but would have been willing to pay the original asking price if he just changed it to Buy It Now.

Here are the 2 messages:

Me - "Good morning - I was wondering if you would do a Buy It Now for this album and at what price?

Thanks

Mike"


Him - "Hello,

I would be able to set the buy it now for the 30% above starting bid, $260 which is the lowest it will allow. Let me know if you are interested."

I did not reply the below but it was my first thought.

Huh? This has gone unsold at $200 at least twice and is 2 days into a relist and still has no bids. And you want more for it when someone finally comes along interested?

My real reply: "I am interested. Would you be able to do it with shipping included?

thanks"

Since he was already charging $17.11 to ship it, It certainly didn't hurt to ask if he would.

Never heard another peep out of him and he never made the listing a BIN.

So along comes Sunday (yesterday) and it still had no bids and was ending that night. I click the bid button and find out he blocked me. Again, finally some sucker(me) comes along and finally shows interest and he had me blocked. Wasn't gonna let me win it for $200 or anything else.

After he relisted it last night, for at least the 4th time, he finally made it a BIN for $200 and jacked up the shipping. The dust accumulating on it must be adding to the overall weight I guess.

And I'm still blocked - not that I would give this guy $20 for it at this point.

I can honestly say this guy will never be accused of being the brightest bulb on the tree.

Not exactly doing much to get a sale. Though I think he ran into ebay's rules on pricing with the Auction price and the Buy It Now Price. There are percentages in play there and I ran into them once trying to list an item. Not sure though what the minimum percentage above the starting bid has to be for Buy It Now.

he thinks this book is valuable and a good buy. Have some friend buy it for you doing an end around?

John - He could have cancelled it and relisted as a BIN in less than 30 seconds


Tom - Thought about it but I ended up spending my money on some better stuff anyway. Once I found out I was blocked, the money I had for that burned a hole in my pocket real quick :)

I don't understand. Why did he block you? (I didn't think such a thing was even possible.)

Requisite joke: Perhaps you were not wearing shirt or shoes.

KGB - you can block anyone you want for any reason. I've got more than a few people on my block list.

Mike33 - Easy enough to do yes. Unless you've used up your freebie for the month and then ebay charges you as if the item sold. Though in all fairness to the seller, he may not have known that you don't necessarily get charged for cancelling.

John that's only if there are bids on an auction

I've gotten hit for a 'sale' with no bids on the item I had to cancel so I don't know how they enforce it.

He was not wrong about the 30% matter. ebay won't allow a buy-it-now option on an auction for less than 30% more than the starting price.

http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/fixed-price.html

He could have risked lowering the start price as an auction in order for the buy-it-now price to come out to that original starting price, but he'd have to feel certain that you really would buy it right then. Otherwise, he might have gotten a bid at that new lower start price and been on the hook for that.

Another option would have been to cancel the listing altogether and relisted it as a fixed-price item.

But, as you've said, he does not sound like an experienced seller (or at least not in stamps), and ebay can be complicated to figure out the intricacies of, whether buyer or seller.

All that said, I don't understand why he would've blocked you. Maybe he thought (incorrectly, in my view) you were asking too many questions and possibly could be trouble further down the road. I don't know. It is unfortunate, and his loss.

The rules of e-bay will always win out.

e-Bay wants to encourage auctions and discourage BINs since an auction is much more likely to sell. And given that probably 3/4 or more of philatelic material is BIN, there is a lot of dead wood that never sells.

On the subject of blocking, one thing I've learned in the business world over many years is that every purchase is made emotionally. As collectors, our purchases certainly fit that model. The challenge as a business person (seller) is to avoid emotional reactions in business. The seller in this case had an emotional reaction to your inquiries and decided to spite you by blocking you. The best business people have the thickest skin, remove their egos from their work as much as possible, and resist reacting emotionally to challenging situations.

Sign next to a shop door: "Everybody passing thru this door brings happiness. Some people by entering. Others by leaving." Granted the above incident is awfully petty. But there are people who I have had problems with once and I have no desire to deal with them again so I block them. Yes, you may miss out on a sale. But then again you may miss out on repeating another headache too.

Blocking buyers is the ONE single thing that ebay has retained that allows a seller even the tiniest control over how they run their business. To take it away would be a travesty, not to mention inviting trouble for sellers.

On the flipside, I wish that ebay allowed buyers to have a "Blocked Seller" list, that prevents you from buying from that seller (and in a perfect world wouldn't even let you see listings from that seller). It's hard to keep track of negative experiences over a 15+ year period on ebay, so having that block at the very least would be a reminder that you've had difficulty with that seller before.

Of course that would affect ebay's bottom line, so no chance it could ever happen.

Another week has gone buy unsold :)

Revenuecollector you can block sellers you don't want to see in your search results through the advanced search. There is one seller on ebay whose stamps I haven't seen in at least 3 years