Re: Ending an auction early?

Angela Marsh <Ang...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

It has one bid and a few days left to go, and someone
emailed me and said they want to get it ASAP and are
willing to pay the original Buy It Now price if I end it
early for them.

Add them to your BBL now.
Consider removing them after a thorough vetting
(AdvancedSearchbyBidder, FB exam, etc.)

Here's what I wrote to the last one who pulled this on me,
a foreign bidder, auto-blocked at the time.
_______
Why won't you give me the opportunity to bid
on those <items>????? I wrote that I agree with
your terms of shipment etc.

Had you simply emailed at the outset that you
agreed with the terms, you would have been
added to the BREL, and bid-enabled immediately.

Your "end early" proposition, however, raised my
suspicions, as it does with most sellers who
honor their eBay agreements. My emails were
intended to discover whether your proposal was
malicious or merely misguided. I'm still not sure.

Before you propose end-early to any other seller,
you need to know how many of them interpret it:

1. Fundamentally, proposing end-early violates at
least one eBay policy, unless it is
end-early-to-high-bidder
(which it wasn't in this case).

The eBay End-My-Auction reasons DO NOT include
"sell to someone other than current high bidder".

The fact that many sellers do this, and seem to
get away with it, doesn't change that it is a
violation, and eBay will NARU them if caught.

2. End-early AND sell off-eBay, which is what you
apparently proposed, violates another policy
(fee avoidance). This policy can be complied
with if the end-early is done as a re-list,
PABA with BIN, but that isn't what you proposed.

A buyer proposing that a seller violate eBay
Policies, is asking the seller to take a big
risk, and be an agreement breaker. I don't
know about you, but I prefer to avoid doing
business with people who don't keep their
agreements. If a seller will blow off their
agreements with eBay, why will they keep their
agreements with the buyer?

3. Economics:
At the very least, the seller assumes that the
"end early" buyer is trying to get the item(s)
below the likely closing price. And indeed, in
the present case, your offer was $25 below
the final values total of the 4 items (and yes,
the results might have been higher had you been
able to bid).

It is almost always an economic error for a
seller to accept an end-early proposal. I never
do it. My experience is that those bidders
(not otherwise blocked) who propose it either
never bid at all, or don't win.

The buyer's desire to get a bargain is in itself
is no reason to block that buyer from bidding,
unless the offer suggests that there are other
problems (see #1 ,2).

4. The seller has to consider the possibility that
the end-early offer is insincere, or even
malicious, such as from another seller trying to
eliminate competing listings, or just an auction
vandal. Your offer may have seemed innocent to
you, but you can see that you cannot assume it
will be taken that way.

One sign of a trouble-maker is a buyer who
proposes an end-early off-eBay deal using eBay
Messaging (which you did). Did you not notice the
warning frames to the right of our communications?
eBay 'bots monitor Message traffic, and likely
alert CSRs to latent problems.

For a seller to end-early after receiving an offer
via eBay Messaging is nearly suicidal (in addition
to being unwise economically).

5. Ending early outrages repeat buyers.
Many of my sales are to people I've sold to before.
The majority of today's sales were. These buyers
watch my listings. If those listings start
disappearing, for what are obviously bogus reasons,
those buyers will disappear too. I'm not willing
to do that to my customers.

Regards,
<.sig>

BREL - Buyer Requirements Exemption List - adding a
user ID to it overrides any other blocks on
that user, such as, in my case,
"countries I don't ship to"

NARU - Not A Registered User - the temporary or
permanent state a user enters for reasons
ranging from incorrect credit card expiry to
persistent policy violator.

PABA - Pre-Approved-Bidder-Auction - can be used to
sell to just one person.

BIN - Buy It Now - can be used for fixed-price-only.

CSR - eBay Customer Service Representative

--
Regards, Bob Niland mailto:name@xxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.access-one.com/rjn email4rjn AT yahoo DOT com
NOT speaking for any employer, client or Internet Service Provider.

.

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