Earlier today, I went to have a look at a guitar which was for sale locally to me. Nothing unusual there. It was advertised on Ebay (can you see the storm clouds forming ahead?). However, after agreeing with the seller that I could come and have a look at it (and being careful not to discuss doing a deal outside of Ebay via their messages and managing to decipher the seller's address details), I went along with cash in my pocket with the intention of making a purchase. I figured that the seller would be happy with this, if we could agree a price (cut out the fees, postage, paypal, etc). I know now that making this assumption was my mistake and I'm angry for making it. After travelling 20 miles to get there, I looked over the instrument and was happy to try to do a deal. It was at this point that the guy said he HAD to sell via Ebay because they would bill him a percentage of the current bid and he couldn't even discuss making a deal - Ebay had to get their fee. I could not believe it! I offered him significantly more than what he could get (before Ebay screw him) and he just wouldn't enter into the possibility of a cash deal. Now, I have put items on Ebay in the past and have pulled them if I got a buyer from, say, Gumtree. It's like putting an advert in a number of different shop windows, isn't it? Having checked out the rules, it appears that the 10% charge is discretionary, but it just makes my blood boil that, once a bid has been placed on your item, Ebay think they have you by the balls. It also really annoyed me to try to deal with someone who was so accepting of how he was being taken for a ride. Has anyone else on this forum encountered a similar scenario and, more to the point, have they managed to navigate their way around the 'rules'?
There. Rant over.
Finally, as I am still interested in the item (and already have several other interested people to compete against, apparently), I will keep an eye on the item in the hope that I can get a winning bid at (or lower) than what I was offering in £20 notes earlier today. Hence, if anyone is interested, I'll disclose what part of the country I'm in and what I've been aiming to buy AFTER the auction closes.
Advice and details of similar experiences are welcome.
Comments
I can't believe I haven't been banned, but some people who've genuinely done nothing wrong have been.
I always say that if I've done something wrong and I get caught then fair enough, but if someone says I've done something wrong and I haven't then I go absolutely mental. Can't stand it when someone tries to punish me for something I haven't done. Especially a website.
Theyre not helpingthemselves with extortionate fees but I don't see an issue at all with them clamping down on people selling outside of eBay. If you don't want to pay fees or by PayPal, move to a different platform, or sell it on here whatever and find other ways to promote your item. They're just clamping down on people who are using and abusing them.
(I appreciate you're the buyer and not the seller and you've done nowt wrong but the seller is just playing by the rules)
Surely they wouldn't still be another a cut in those circumstances?
If you decide to cancel an auction once it has already been bid on, you simply have lost your insertion fee.
If if you do this ^ enough times, you'll get banned or summat.
For instance, if you ask Christie's to sell something for you and you sell it before the auction date, they'll probably ask you for some sort of small compensation, but they wouldn't have any real case against you other than agreeing to their specific terms and conditions - my reasoning for that is that their sale hasn't actually taken place, whereas with ebay the auction is the entire process.
So the contract is to sell the item via an auction. On ebay, the auction starts from the moment you click 'List' and so while so far they haven't charged for withdrawing the item, if they've decided that charging you for all that's entailed in listing it on ebay, they're really within their rights because their platform is costing them and they want compensating for that regardless. How much they charge you is a very different issue indeed, though.
Christie's is different - they would do all sort of background things like listing it in the catalogue, advertising it in their listings, contacting previous buyers they know might be interested, that sort of thing, so they would be doing work that they would rightly expect you to pay for, which is what the seller's premium is there for. So if you pulled an item before the auction, they'd expect you to pay a charge of some sort. But it would be clearly mentioned in their ts and c's, and very probably drawn to your attention when you took the item in and signed the contract.
What all this boils down to is that you really do need to read the t's and c's before you click that you've read them, because I'll bet it's in there.
If that doesn't make as much sense as I'd hoped, blame my Friday night beers.
The seller could have sorted it so that everyone was happy. The more I read about eBay the more sellers seem to be "scared".
Easy answer is if you don't like the eBay system, avoid it. I remember the days when snagging a guitar on eBay from another blood thirsty bidder was fun. Now everyone wants to try and save money/time by agreeing early deals to shaft ebay.
I thought part of the glory was hanging on until the counter was at 10 seconds before making the big move? Not defending eBay's fees btw but you can't help but think (same as car insurance) if everyone just followed a few rules the fees may be a little lower?
Ps - OP it would have been good if that seller had told you he wasn't going to sell it locally but I guess it wasn't too far to travel to find the info out. Still annoying
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If you've ever made a best offer on something you'll notice you get a 'you are entering a contract and bound to pay' message come up.
So I had someone enter a best offer for an item I was selling and then when I accepted they said they didn't want it.
Contacted ebay and said "what are you going to do about this? It says he's entered in to a contract and has to pay, so when is my money coming?".
They weren't interested in the slightest and said its not really a contract.
Also what some people seem to forget about in their unseemly haste to cut out the ebay fees is the people who have bid in good faith for the item.
Screw them as well I suppose?