I Discovered I Was Blocked From Bidding

I had sent an ebay message to the seller and he did not respond.

Stamps1962,

I have of been blocked by one person after all of my years on ebay. I had successfully dealt with him at least ten times. On the last transaction the stamp was late (weeks) in arriving so I asked him about it. The next time I found I was blocked. You guessed it - Georgetown Law! I also inquired as to why but received no reply.

Jack Kelley

Jack,
You might want to revisit those purchases and double check for proper identification. You might also consider dipping the stamps to check for hidden faults. (Assuming that you haven't done this already.)

It may be too late to return anything but at least you would have verified that you have mounted the stamps correctly in your albums.
Don

100% wrong. Please don't use ebay's discussion boards as ANY evidence of official policy. The discussion boards are rife with rampant speculation, frequently from self-proclaimed experts.

It's best to go directly to ebay's policies:

http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies...-buying.html

As you can see, "You can't use another account to buy or bid on an item if you're on a seller's blocked bidder or buyer list."

Will do Don. If I can recall, I think most of the material was the FDR National Park issues.

Jack Kelley

Regarding multiple accounts, can a seller have several accounts?
I saw 3 different sellers, from the same country, offering the same amount of stamps, with the same description, same terms of bidding, for the same duration. Coincidence?

As an example, the British Cartel seller has previously been dropped from ebay for having as many as 50 accounts. He is infamous for having material float between his multiple seller names.

There is also a thriving 3rd party industry in the selling of ebay accounts with high feedbacks and 'top seller' ratings. In less than a few minutes you can purchase a ebay account that makes it look like you have been in business for years with 100% feedback.
Don

I sell stamps on ebay for approximately 20 years now, and in all that time I blacklisted about 20 individuals. I don't think one bad apple per year is too many, on average. After all, on ebay we are dealing with the whole world, and world is full of crazy people, not to mention those who may hate your guts just because they peeked your policial views on some forum, or just because.

Once, a 89-years old buyer from Italy won 12 expensive lots and refused to sign for their receipt, so stamps returned to me, and he posted 12 negative feedbacks in most passionate style. Why did he not sign for insured letter? God knows. But I banned him, and later found out that other sellers had similar problems with him. Maybe the old geezer just lost it.

Other memorable, more recent case was when a person from Israel with Russian name bought, very cheaply, a genuine Luebeck Michel No. 1 stamp from me (watermarked, with small thin as described). He expressed his dissatisfaction in ebay message. I answered by telling him that I always guarantee full refund upon return, for any reason or even without reason. Instead of returning the stamp he didn't like, he left a negative feedback with one word: "ugly"; ebay refused to remove this feedback, arguing that I could answer to it and explain what happened to anyone concerned. So I banned this guy from bidding. I suspect that this buyer didn't like me for personal reasons, and used an opportunity to do me some dirt. Who knows?

Patience, patience. It is as important in philately as in everything else.

I don't understand this need for a PERFECT feedback . Many of you think that your judged on a 100% feedback rating .
We all understand this world has more than a fair share of NUTJOBS, MEAN PEOPLE and down right CRAZY PEOPLE . It is safe to say if you got a large number of positive feedbacks and you been around for years that 2 or 3 unstable people will come across your offers on ebay and cause you trouble . I sold stamps for many years thru ads in the major stamp newspapers and I got a file of people who had issues with what I was selling , some of the compliants were just down right stupid and even some needed a respond both to the writer and some to the newspaper .
Why judge a person who has hundreds and sometimes thousands of completed transactions because of one or two complaints ,100% feedback just tells me ,this person can be scared and gives in to these people who forget to take their medications before getting on ebay .

Wait, what?

That's idiotic.

100% feedback could legitimately mean zero problems with buyers. It's a rolling average, and negatives roll off the calulation at some point. It depends on your niche, your refund policies, your shipping costs, the quality of your packaging, your responsiveness to customer inquries, and the magnitude of your sales volume (the greater the volume, the greater the likelihood of a negative... someone with 4 or 5 figures of annual sales transactions will almost always have a negative or two in the mix, but lower volume sellers might not).

100% feedback most certainly does NOT mean that you automatically cave to unreasonable buyers.

P.S. This thread is about blocked buyers, not 100% feedback.

As has been discussed multiple times in this forum and many other places, the ebay feedback and rating system is lame and virtually worthless. Folks buy into ebay hype when it actually serves ebay alone.

Does anyone really think that a seller can have 15,000+ transactions without a single complaint? Does anyone think it is hard to trash a seller by simply buying a few things using another account and then leaving negative feedbacks? Or that blocking a person who is bent upon playing games with a seller is going to work? Good sellers can have a bad rating and bad sellers can have a sterling rating.

ebay has worked hard to fool buyers into thinking that sending money to an unknown person in a unknown location is perfectly safe. They back this up by siding with the buyer in most cases. We have all seen the result of this ebay marketing (even in this forum). 'Oh the seller had 100% feedback' or 'I'm not taking risks when I buy because I can always get my money back'.

But the truth is that there are ways to establish ebay accounts without any vetting whatsoever; no legitimate physical address, no legitimate banking history, no legitimate sales history. ebay has no more knowledge of the seller than any of the rest of us. They have to keep the playing field unbalanced in favor of the buyer or the entire business model fails. And the meaningless rating system is a part of the marketing charade.

This sucks for the folks who use the system correctly.
Don

Striving for 100% feedback reminds me of the Nosedive episode in Black Mirror:

"The episode is set in a world where people can rate each other from one to five stars for every interaction they have"

Then at least one country started doing just that...

I only buy on ebay never sold as yet, a couple of years ago I tried to bid on a stamp only to find I was " blocked " by the seller !!!!

I'd dealt with him several dozen times and never had a problem, always paid on time and always left positive feedback,

so I email him and ask why was I blocked ? never got a response
i know one thing he's lost a lot of money not only what I would have brought but that I hadn't won but bidded up to a higher price.

As I say not sure why I was blocked or how easy it is to block someone, could it have been a slip of keypad and choosen the wrong user to block.

I don't think it's possible to block someone by accident, you have to open your blocked bidder list and then add the offenders usernames to the list. it's not difficult but it's not a slip of the key either.

I want to know how to block an ebay seller. As far as I know, you can't.

Doesn't seem fair - seller can block a buyer but not the other way around.