What Selling on eBay Gets You
Jonathan Zdziarski
July 2007
If you're anything like me, you use eBay once in a while when you have
something of value to hock. It's become too risky for most of us to bother with
buying anything of value, but selling something still sounded safe to me until
I listed my Macbook Pro.
The goal was to sell a perfectly good, but one generation old Macbook Pro and
purchase the newer model which has a better LCD panel.
It sounded like an easy task, but I was rudely awoken to my erroneous
belief that you can still sell stuff on eBay. Here's what it got me...
Buy-it-Now Scams
Buy-it-Now is a great tool allowing me to buy/sell items without the prolongued
wait you get with an auction. Many argue that it's ruined eBay by allowing
merchants to flood the website with Chinese rubber dog poop or cellphone
chargers, and that's one reason that I rarely use it to buy an item. That, and the fact that most merchants usually sell out of virtual inventory, leaving me
with a longer wait, and possibly a backordered item.
I still use Buy-it-Now for selling, though. At least I did until I tried to
actually use it.
After listing my auction twice with a Buy-it-Now, it was painfully obvious that
the feature no longer had the value I once placed on it.
Within minutes of listing my item,
someone came along and hit the cash register, only to find out that they were
Nigerian scammers looking to hornswoggle me out of my laptop. The scam works
this way: the scammer sends a transaction to you via Paypal or bank wire.
You ship the item. All seems fine, until a few days later, when your bank
(or Paypal) freezes your account and notifies you that the deposit was a
fraudulent transaction that has now been voided. Suddenly you owe the bank
lots of money and have lost the item you were selling. To add insult to
injury, you've got eBay seller feed to contend with - an annoying and tedious
process to get refunds.
Why we can't just block the entire country of Nigeria I don't know. How much legitimate traffic actually comes out of there?
Buy-it-Now is unusable for high-profile items such as electronics. Two auctions later, I figured this out and decided to re-list my auction without Buy-it-Now in
hopes that it would last more than a few minutes...
Bidding Scams
Even if you refrain from using Buy-it-Now, you've still got a series of
bidding scams to deal with, forcing you to police your auction until the very
end - and
even then, you might get stuck with a bad bidder. Bidding scams work pretty
much the same way I described above, only the nuissance now becomes
prolongued over the entire duration of the auction. In many cases, the
scammer first sent me questions to sound legitimate, such as
"will you ship to Singapore?". Sometimes, they would even go ahead and bid on
the item before I got a chance to answer. This can really clog up your
auction, and turns off potential legitimate buyers. So now you've got to invest
the time to cancel and block certain bidders - but they just keep
coming back: new usernames, but the same shtick.
If you're getting ready to list an item, you'll now need to plan time out from
the next several days to watch the auction and cancel bogus bids.
Phishing
I mentioned a minute a go that I received several bogus questions via email.
Well at least some of those "questions" appeared to be very well-tailored
phishing scams.
When you click on the eBay link to log in, it actually takes you to a mock-up
site where a scammer can steal your eBay ID. This is how these
people got stolen accounts to work with in the first place - legitimate
users giving our their login information thinking they were answering a
question. Never click on an email link from anybody, even if it looks to be
from your mother. Trust me, ma will understand.
This is one of the problems with listing your email address in an auction.
It's useful in that it allows people to contact you directly, but opens
up a world of pain and suffering for less-than-savvy sellers.
Lots of Spam
On top of the scams and phishing emails, you'll also have to deal with a lot
of spam. This is because eBay doesn't really have any mechanism to prevent
bot scripts from trolling their website for auctions. You'll receive
"question from seller" emails that contain messages like this:
Hi, friends
Nice to meet you .
First of all,let me introduce our company.We are an electronic instruments
wholesaler.This is our website www.online-elecshop.com. We sell most of our
products at low competitive prices. At the same time, they are all in high
quality.All them comes with 1 year international warranty.
We mainly sell ps3,gps,mobile,hd tv,digital camera,ipods,and so on.
They are all brand new, and they are all sealed in the originaln boxes.
They all have multi-languages for the menu and in the instruction, such as
english, french, spanish.,italian, german,and so on.
If you are interest in some of them or want to know more information, please
contact us through our email ,msn or telephone:
MSN:onlin-elecshop2@hotmail.com
E-mail:onlin-elecshop22@hotmail.com
Fortunately my spam filter was smart enough to tell the difference between
eBay spam and legitimate questions, but a nuissance nonetheless.
Lame, n00b requests and bids
If the scammers don't ruin your auction by now, the noobies most likely will.
You've always got some soccer mom who hasn't got a clue about what you're
bidding on asking you dumb questions they could otherwise lookup themselves.
The most annoying ones, however, are messages from new users with no feedback
or negative feedback who want to bid on your auction. I made it very clear in
my own auction that I would not accept bids from users with no feedback,
private feedback, or negative feedback. That didn't stop people from asking me
if they could bid on my item with this kind of feedback - and some were
surprisingly rude enough to bid without even waiting for my "no" to come in
the mail. I suspect some of these may be scammers, but at least some of
them were just blatant idiots. This takes me back to having to police your
auction for its entire
duration. You don't want to sell to these people, but you also don't want
their bids to clog up your auction. Legitimate buyers will pass by an
auction already bidded near its value, and if your item is already priced
up there, even a single bogus bid might cause you to lose a legitimate sale.
An Unusable eBay
eBay's gotten to the point where their archaic systems and lack of good
security have made it possible for scammers and spammers to overrun their
website, unfortunately ruining it for the rest of us. After three attempts to
sell my Macbook Pro, I've come to the unfortunately conclusion that eBay is
no longer usable unless you want to devote your full-time career to it.
eBay could take many steps to cut back on the amount of fraud and spamming
going on about their website. Just for starters:
- Implementing strong CAPTCHAs to send messages would help prevent bots from spamming.
- Human spammers use similar message content for each message, so using a signature-tracking system for sent messages would allow eBay to easily detect outbound spam and disable accounts.
- To combat stolen account information, forcing the user to
answer some security questions prior to listing would make it more difficult
for a scammer to do anything with a stolen eBay login.
- "Pro" users, who earn a living selling on eBay could be given the option to obtain a SafeWord(tm) or SecurID(tm) token, which is a hardware device that contains a forever-changing series of one-time passwords. You carry it on your key
chain and it prevents anyone from logging in without it, short of an elaborate and real-time attack.
- Telephone verification for bidders could be automated so that you must sign on a phone number when you create an account, and a system at eBay will call you to verify a first-time bid on an item. If your account is hijacked, the user can push a key code to cancel the bid and summarily lock their account from further activity.
These are just a few practical (and affordable) solutions, and there are
several other things eBay could be doing as well.
Unfortunately, the problem is that eBay isn't actually doing any of these, and
this has hurt their reputability with a large percentage of the Internet community.
Is eBay usable anymore? It doesn't appear so for high-dollar items, and their
site is flooded with cheap low-dollar items from online vendors who flood
the auction site with their products (thanks to Buy-it-Now). I guess if you're
looking to buy or sell a lamp or a used guitar, you might be able to manage.
Just don't expect to conduct any transactions where you can't afford to get
bamboozled out of the cash, or an item - as you may very well lose out.
What selling on eBay gets you: less time and no money!
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