eBay Tip - Why Looking at Bid History is so Important
Recently, we noticed an unusual item on the eBay "featured items" homepage section (this is the scrolling window that you can pay £50 to get seen in). The item was described as being the remains of something that the seller’s dog had chewed up.
Curious to see what was behind this weird item title, we clicked through to the listing and found that the item was apparently genuinely for sale, but was really a “pointer” to the seller’s other items for sale (which is perfectly within eBay policy guidelines).
These other items consisted of “get rich quick” schemes which are not usually viewed with great favour by eBay since they can sometimes infringe copywrite or be otherwise misleading.
So we took a look at the seller’s feedback and found similar items that had been sold previously. With one exception, all feedback was positive. Intrigued by this, we took a look at the bid history for the current items and found that the same four or five user IDs appeared across all 7 items for sale. Even more curious was that on clicking for details of previously sold items, around 60% had been removed by eBay.
Possibly this is an example of “if it looks too good to be true, it probably is”. To keep things in context, the vast majority of items for sale on eBay are from genuine sellers, but it can be quite difficult to check the price of an item whose listing has finished so you can see if the current item you want to bid on is a real bargain. So we’ve introduced the “What’s it Worth” archive to help you asses the real value of an eBay item.
Curious to see what was behind this weird item title, we clicked through to the listing and found that the item was apparently genuinely for sale, but was really a “pointer” to the seller’s other items for sale (which is perfectly within eBay policy guidelines).
These other items consisted of “get rich quick” schemes which are not usually viewed with great favour by eBay since they can sometimes infringe copywrite or be otherwise misleading.
So we took a look at the seller’s feedback and found similar items that had been sold previously. With one exception, all feedback was positive. Intrigued by this, we took a look at the bid history for the current items and found that the same four or five user IDs appeared across all 7 items for sale. Even more curious was that on clicking for details of previously sold items, around 60% had been removed by eBay.
Possibly this is an example of “if it looks too good to be true, it probably is”. To keep things in context, the vast majority of items for sale on eBay are from genuine sellers, but it can be quite difficult to check the price of an item whose listing has finished so you can see if the current item you want to bid on is a real bargain. So we’ve introduced the “What’s it Worth” archive to help you asses the real value of an eBay item.
