Bills Bargain And Stukatz

Are these 2 sellers in pricing cahoots, where one user sets a rediculous price for something, the other discounts on that price, and they entertain best offers that are still not competitive. All the while effectively locking up specific sections of the market, with little other providers of the material. Feels a bit shady after I perused about 18000 listings over the last couple of days.

I have only been able to purchase one item from William Lang. I don't believe I have ever purchased anything from Mr Katz. Mr Lang only occasionally responds to offers even if he holds on to items for years. Why that is financially worthwhile for him to do this is unclear. His argument is that someone somewhere will eventually be interested in the item—-maybe. I would advise very close attention to the wording of the certif the item has a cert. many times the cert wording is at variance with the advertised description and "VF appearance" to me is code for flaws. I personally would not purchase without a cert . Lang's has many scarce items but too many have faults for my taste.

Yes, sometimes ebay needs to maybe look around at other applications, like Facebook, where you can "unfriend" someone.

If you could make all of these "questionable" sellers totally disappear from whatever you look at on ebay, the platform would (almost immediately, I think) become much more popular, that it already is.

Jim

I've long lamented the lack of a "blocked seller list" for buyers, since there is a "blocker buyer list" for sellers.

Why, you might ask? It's hard to keep track of all the negative buying experiences over 20 years on ebay. I want a blocked seller list, ideally implemented such that "don't show me any listings from seller XXX", but even if not that, to effectively "don't let me make the mistake of buying from seller XXX again". Don't let me bid or buy from a seller I've blocked; at the very least put up an alert when I try to do so, so that I go back and revisit why I blocked them.

However, that's not in ebay's best interests, so they won't implement it.

I've never understood Bill's business model. He has over 80,000 items listed and if you look at his "Sold" items he's has 790 sales. I list 60 items/week and in the same period I've "Sold" 726 items. Of course his average sales price is higher than mine but I make it up in low inventory and high turnover.

I believe that that is called...

Jim

But you can eliminate sellers - at least if you shop in any of ebay's preset categories - say US 1901-1940 Unused - when you get to the list look on the left side (you will have to scroll down a little bit) and find the "More refinements" - click on it and you will get a menu, select "Seller", select "Only show items from", with my browser (Chrome) there is a defect where you have to then put something in the box before you can select the "Specific Sellers" button, then make sure Exclude is selected and enter the overpriced sellers you want to get rid of and hit the Apply button. I have no idea if there is a way to save this or if you have to do it every time, but I keep a list of sellers to block in a text file I paste in each time.

I get regular emails from Hipstamps forum, lamenting the same, time and time and time again, I requested it 2 years ago, its never going to happen.
It's hard to understand.

FWIW, I've made many fair offers to billsbargainstamps that were accepted over the last few years.

I guess it depends on what one considers a fair offer. My last offer to him for an item that appeared to be in his inventory for some years was 80% of cat, which he turned down. I came away feeling like he did not really want to sell the item.

For blocking sellers, posted this on a similar Stamp Community thread:

Posted 11/06/2018 05:43 am

Much easier to use ebay's "Exclude" in their search function - they make it difficult to find and set-up, but once it's saved in your Favorite Searches, works pretty well.

With their Search box at the top of a page in the Stamps category, scroll all the way down the options on the left hand side to Categories/More Refinements/Seller/Only Show Items From/Specific Seller/Exclude and drop in a list of sellers you don't want to see (from a Word document, etc)

Of course, depending on how their servers are feeling that day, you might get an HTTP Error 502 but resending the request a few times always gets through. There is a limit on the number of exclusions but that changes regularly - I've excluded over 200 IDs.

Then you can save that search to your My ebay Page under Saved Searches and directly click on it next time.

Steve Taylor
www.stephentaylor.co.uk

Dry Tech, I have offered anywhere down to 60 percent of Bill's listings and been accepted. One thing we don't know is if any particular item is on consignment and how much maneuver room this leaves him to accept an offer. I have noticed that there are various item locations in his listings.

Did I miss it? Where is the link to show who these sellers are on ebay?

I had purchased some material from Bill and Stu about 15yrs ago on ebay and got the impression that they had some aspect in common. It was not a negative aspect. It was like some items shipped from same location.

60% of way too much is still too much

centerstage:

https://www.ebay.com/str/billlangsbargainstamps
http://www.ebaystores.com/stuartkat...orcollectors