Evilbay just got more evil.

Rebar

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.

Pablocrackers

Yeh this is true I am currently on ban from eBay and under warning if I list something on there and it sells on another site they will charge me the selling fee even if no one contacted me on eBay - it's complete bullshit

BloodEagle

He probably had the listing up on one of eBay's increasingly frequent £1 maximum fee offers so was fine with it. eBay are wankers though - I would expect a warning or suspension email imminently 

ThorpyFX

You see he should have just raised the price of the guitar to £10k, Sold it to you anyway and waited for the listed to die a natural death.....

DefaultM

ThorpyFX said:

You see he should have just raised the price of the guitar to £10k, Sold it to you anyway and waited for the listed to die a natural death.....

Haha I've done that a few times.
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. 

Jack_

inb4 the "you use their services, you should pay their fees" brigade.

Stuckfast

Not wishing to defend the evil empire, but if you list an item for auction on eBay, aren't you entering into a contract to sell it to the highest bidder? So once someone has bid, withdrawing the item from sale could be seen as breach of contract. Maybe.

Rebar

Ebay really are scumbags, but what really surprised me was that the guy was almost sticking up for Ebay. There was no 'I'd love to work something out, but...'. It was like dealing with an Ebay CEO. I had the conscious thought at the time that they'd finally beaten the little man. Ultimately, I think they're shooting themselves in the foot, as I will never sell anything through them again, but that doesn't help with my current GAS.

Fortheloveofguitar

In the long term eBay is finished for sellers like us. It's just a market place for cheap Chinese made shite and tat these days 

rossi

Ebay is an auction and sales site .Try screwing Christies and see what you get ,

wackojacko

Stuckfast said:

Not wishing to defend the evil empire, but if you list an item for auction on eBay, aren't you entering into a contract to sell it to the highest bidder? So once someone has bid, withdrawing the item from sale could be seen as breach of contract. Maybe.

This. If you read the small print, you enter a contract with eBay as the selling platform for your guitar/whatever you're selling once listed. If you sell said item and the buyer has found your item via eBay, they're due their cut. I'd be miffed if I promoted/auctioned someone's product and they sold it elsewhere. 

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) 

Fuengi

So what would happen if an item was damaged, lost or stolen during the bid process?

Surely they wouldn't still be another a cut in those circumstances? 

wackojacko

Fuengi said:

So what would happen if an item was damaged, lost or stolen during the bid process?

Surely they wouldn't still be another a cut in those circumstances? 

Not sure how it's possible for an item to get damaged while bidding is happening....ok yes I see where you're coming from but the item shouldn't be up for auction in that case (in the eyes of eBay) 

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. 

Trotter

Had a similar scenario years ago but it worked out in my favour: Made an off ebay offer for a car, the vendor decided to let the auction run instead. I then ended up winning the auction for £500 less than I had offered him outside of Ebay.. He was pretty pissed when I came to pick it up..

TheOtherDennis

rossi said:

Ebay is an auction and sales site .Try screwing Christies and see what you get ,

Not the same thing at all. I'm sure fretmeister will be along in a minute to correct me, but the way I understand it is that what matters is what the contract is actually for - if it's for selling something, then they can't charge you if you sell it somewhere else. But if the contract is for the service provided by the site, whether you sell it or not, then they are entitled to charge. That's probably what ebay have decided to start doing.

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.

GoldenEraGuitars

I don't really use eBay anymore but I have a business account. Seems to work very differently to how you describe it. 

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

DefaultM

This about entering a contract with ebay and having to pay is total bullshit. 

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. 

Neil

ThorpyFX said:

You see he should have just raised the price of the guitar to £10k, Sold it to you anyway and waited for the listed to die a natural death.....

You can't alter a listing once a bid has been placed.

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? 

DefaultM

You're listing on eBay because you want money for something. If someone makes an acceptable offer and I can do the deal today then the last thing on my mind would be someone who's bid already being disappointed. They've probably only bid £67.03 for your custom shop strat anyway if it's in the early stages.

Neil

DefaultM said:

You're listing on eBay because you want money for something. If someone makes an acceptable offer and I can do the deal today then the last thing on my mind would be someone who's bid already being disappointed. They've probably only bid £67.03 for your custom shop strat anyway if it's in the early stages.

Well you've made your position (and your ethics) abundantly clear. 

BloodEagle

Haha yeah you absolute bastard, now those poor downtrodden custom shop strat buyers will have to buy their luxury goods elsewhere