Argh Ebay!!!!

[Cyberus]

I'm sick to death of watching an item on ebay, and often bidding, only for the seller to take a cash offer, cancel my bid, and end the auction early!!!!:-(

Doesn't the seller realise that auctions are the way to get a good price? AND that its against the terms of service, Bastards!

[Cyberus]

MarkTime wrote:
Hey Cyberius,

btw (same to YOU)...was just reading your avatar...

Shhh! ;-)

but back to the subject...I'm working on a project...just as a hobby in my spare time, where I am collecting data from online auctions using a bot, and going to perform some statistical analysis on them.

answer questions like, just how much does the length of the auction impact the price, using real math...and other questions, like the time of day the auction ends...the day it ends.

Or, for commodity items like gold, how does the spot price affect the price as the spot price is rising...or as it is decreasing.

I don't know why I'm exactly mentioning this on this thread...but if anyone has a question that needs answering like that...I would love having more questions to *try* and discover the answer too.

Then we can have actual math...real answers...to these common questions and speculations.

Dunno if I ever will finish...I finish about 20% of the projects I start...but still, sometimes I finish them...so theres a chance.

Well I'm trying to have a clear out of stuff at the moment, and was thinking that Sunday evenings would be a good time to have my items end, as I reckon there are lots of people around, relaxing in front of their puters at the end of the weekend, rather than a Friday night or whatever. Ebay can be quite strange, inasmuch as you'll have three similar items, and one will go for huge amounts (I saw a blizzard 1230 go for 130 quid on UK ebay, when they usually go for about thirty or so!!!) while the others will hardly go above start price.

[Cyberus]

StevenJGore wrote:

I'm sick to death of watching an item on ebay, and often bidding, only for the seller to take a cash offer, cancel my bid, and end the auction early!!!!

Was it the auction for the CD32 SX-1 module (on eBay UK) that you are referring to? I had it in my watched items list, and I noticed it was withdrawn with all bids cancelled over the weekend. I was interested to see what price it went for... obviously the seller got an offer he couldn't refuse (doesn't make it right though!). I'd never dream of doing that with my items, I even include the text "Don't ask me to end auctions early!" in all my item descriptions. I used to get about half a dozen requests per auction, usually for the rare items.

Steve.

Yes it was the SX-1 !!!

But its not the first time this has happened....

[Cyberus]

Guess what? I just checked my email....and one of my bids has been cancelled on another item. Supposedly there was an 'error in the listing'. Can't have been too bad an error, the item had received about 14 bids or so and had gone from its start price of 1GBP to about 30GBP and still had  a day to run.....sigh.

So does this mean I should start asking sellers to end their auctions early by making cash offers otherwise I will always miss out? Completely destroying the idea of ebay?  :-(  :-(  :-(

[Cyberus]

@ Red

How do you go about filing complaints with ebay? It seems as if getting in touch with them is made as difficult as possible....

[Cyberus]