Why Was My Offer For $3 Declined?

Seller could not with a clear conscience charge you $9.95 shipping for a $3 item so declined.

He wants a bit more! Wow, what a classic card. Evidence of mice having enjoyed the card too!

Go check out his/her other stamp items. 20-40 common stamps on pages. Cheapest lots starts at $33 - 37 range on up to $200. Seems high to me. Can they possibly sell any of that stuff? A simple search of ebay will find dozens of reasonable deals on similar stuff. It boggles the mind.

Halloween postcards are hotly collected. They're pretty scarce, think about it how many people send Halloween postcards?

Postcards like this typically sell for between 50 and $100.

I sometimes get worried when I even look at something like that on ebay.

What if I suddenly sneezed and in my paroxysm clicked on "buy it now."

"Estate find!"

Glory hallelujah!

Oh no! I have heard of going to hell in a hand basket, Is it two pumpkins getting ready to do a missile test from one of those rogue nations?

Alub is right about Hallowe'en postcards commanding prices in the $100 range. That's actually a nice one. The selling price is, of course, ridiculous.

One thing that irks me about ebay "sold items" is that ebay outright lies about the transaction, the sold price of which was probably a small fraction of what is claimed.

Hi archerg,
I respectfully disagree with your opinion that ebay lies, the software and system records the transaction whatever it might be. I would agree that the ebay system is manipulated by people looking to take advantage of others. I view this exactly the same as I do an income tax system, a government benefits system, a computer system or a network. Ultimately people will seek to exploit the system often while taking advantage of others. The underlying issue is greed and exploitation.

ebay can be criticized for being complicit by not doing good vetting of account holders but truthfully I am not sure that anyone would use the service if they had to pass on the costs of what it would take to actually do good account vetting. ebay can also be criticized for an incredibly lame feedback system which is also exploited by many.

And one of the reasons that systems often tend to get complicated is that as people spend time figuring out ways to exploit it, more layers are added to prevent the exploitations. It is a cycle that loops around and around all driven by exploitation.

Lastly if one wants to look for corporate evils, ebay is not much different than Google, Amazon, Facebook, or Twitter (except that ebay is a mom and pop compared to those companies). The evil is that they are using our personal data, and access to our data, without being transparent or taking care.

The seduction is that it appears 'free'. Every single time a person searches on Google they ring the cash register. Every online search, every online click, every online visits is exactly the same as a bee coming back to the bee hive after visiting a flower. The bee keeper is offering the empty hive for 'free' but the truth is that the bees are duped into making money for him.

ebay is also doing this, selling our data. Folks like to complain about ebay fees or their change in their terms and conditions but they are missing the point. Like the duped bees, they are being distracted from how ebay is selling, trading our data.

For example like many people who have read this thread, I clicked on and visited the ebay link for this moronic listing. Within a few hours, I had an 'offer' sitting in my Inbox from the seller. ebay has no qualms about using my personal access data as a profit center. They can use it, they can allow the seller to use it, they can allow 3rd parties to use it. And then those 3rd parties can sell, trade or give away the fact that I visited that link, I like stamps, I like Halloween stuff, I like postcards, I am willing to make online purchases, I am active online at certain hours, I am located in a certain part of the country, etc. I think that this is the bigger issue; we are allowing our personal access data to be monetized without a second thought.
Don

Don,

While "lie" may be a strong word, my several decades as a buyer, seller, and as an affiliate advertiser for ebay have taught me that ebay DOES misdirect, obfuscate, and misrepresent. Sometimes it is deliberate but frequently it is unintentional through incompetence on an epic scale.

In this case, what I believe archerg is referring to is ebay's practice of showing completed Best Offer listings as having sold at the original listing price rather than the actual negotiated price. Their intent is to likely not reveal the price that two private parties agreed upon, but also has the side effect of making historical pricing data for Best Offer transactions completely useless. The only thing you know for certain is the most an item "might have sold for."

There used to be a trick to sort sold items from lowest to highest or vice versa, and the listing would sort based upon the real price sold while displaying the original listing price, which would allow you to "home in" on the actual selling price if there were enough items in the search query... but I don't know if that method still works.

I'll clarify my previous overdramatic post, with thanks to previous posters for chastising me. When one searches by sold items, ebay conceals the true negotiated price between buyer and seller, and if this nice postcard actually sold it would show as a $10K sale.