Ebay changes, again

When you've been outbid on ebay and the listing has finished you can no longer see who's beaten you.

My view, bad move. It gives free reign to dealers to hoover up stuff.

What's your views?

Don`t see the problem TBH, if you do not bid enough you get outbid.
Does it matter who outbids you?

Davex.

I don't understand how it gives free reign to dealers to hoover up. There's nothing wrong with dealers buying whatever they like anyway.

Bidders are made private in some cases to prevent bogus Second Chance Offers and the like. That is a good idea.

Not a problem for me as a buyer or a seller.

Yes, I totally agree and have thought the same

I don't see how it gives dealers or anyone else "free reign" either. If they bid more they win, just like anybody else.

If I don't win an item I don't really care who has.

To be honest I use an auto bidder which tells me if I have won, if it doesn't report back then I rarely check to see who did get it.

Hiding bidder's ID's is bad for the bidder and shouldn't be allowed. Protecting against 2nd chance offers is just a smoke screen. If I go to a live auction I can see whose bidding against me, on ebay you can't and you can't see if a fierce competitor or dealer has won.... all wrong, but most stuff is anyway.

shim

What difference does it make though, all it would do is make me wish I had bid an extra £5 or whatever.

Bidders at live auctions aren't as vulnerable to fraudulent offers. There are telephone and commission bidders at live auctions as well. You don't see who they are.

I don't need to see who is bidding against me. All I'm concerned about is the seller, the item, and the price. Good luck to any dealer who outbid me!

So the feeling is it doesn't matter then?

I still like to know who's won and this stops me doing that.

Still....

I think I know why they've done it. In the recent scam that I almost lost the £410 I'd paid for a GX20, the people who set up the action group were able to contact and bring together about 600 people who'd been scammed by going back over the auctions archived on Google's cache system (ebay delete stuff quickly). This in turn brought pressure on ebay and they settled over a quarter of a million in claims rather than have the matter escalated. If you remove the winning bidders ID, it means people who have been scammed can't be contacted by anyone else who's been scammed and there is still a lot of scamming going on. One girl out of our group got reimbursed for a Nikon body, went and bought another one and got scammed again, she paid by Paypal the 2nd time and reclaimed off them. The people who scammed us had done at least two previous scams.

I'll mention this to the action group to see if they want to take it any further.

Our scammers had fled to North Wales, but got arrested for GBH whilst over there. link

The Lancashire Police have asked for them to be detained link Post No: 193

shim

"Bidders are made private in some cases to prevent bogus Second Chance Offers and the like. That is a good idea"

In theory you are right...however have you heard of a thing called 'shill bidding?' ...a seller using a 3rd party to bid on his/her item and bid the price up? This is rife on ebay and hiding the bidders ID simply makes this FAR easier. Ebay gave some 'excuses' to hide bidders ID's which included helping to stamp out false 2nd chance offers (as you say)...however the real issue is shill bidding.

They could have scrapped the useless 2nd chance scheme completely, then forgot about the hiding bidders ID's nonsense and helped with the shill bidding..but they could'nt be bothered.

Shim just made another VERY good point. They want ebay users to be unable to contact other ebay auction winners...hiding bidders ID's does this. The ability to contact others also as Shim says, often prevents users being scammed.

I once contacted an auction winner to say I thought the items they had won were fakes. The outcome (3 months later) was that I was right and the winner ended taking the seller to small claims court and winning. With hiding bidders ID's I would now be unable to contact the scammed winner.

Simply removing the troublesome 2nd chance scheme (as I said) would have removed the fake 2nd chance offers issue and users ID's could have stayed visible...however many users including me are of the strong opinion that ebay removed the visibility for OTHER reasons....do not believe all they say.

Sellers dishonest enough to indulge in shill bidding don't need it to be any easier. It's easy enough even when bidder IDs are public.

Second Chance Offers are not useless. I've taken advantage of them both as a seller and a buyer. They save time and stress.

Removing the Second Chance Offer facility would not stop fraudsters making bogus second chance offers anyway. They would just do it by sending a message via Contact Member instead. The only way of doing it is to hide the IDs.

Making bidder IDs public enables scammers to target victims specifically based on items they're interested in. That is much more effective for them than random spamming. This I can believe is a greater problem than any that a few good Samaritans can solve by contacting members directly. Do not believe the conspiricy theorists.

Hiding bidder IDs is not new, by the way. eBay has been doing it for some time.