...revealing everyone’s max bid limit, then cancelling the bid
This.
I regularly buy on eBay and decided to sell a number of old hand tools. I have sold before, but not for a while. I put the the first tool as an auction to get the hang again, then waited 10 days for something to happen. During that time I purchased several items using buy it now and realised that I now AVOID auctions unless the items is particularly rare or special.
The BIN selling options interface seems to vary significantly depending on how you crate the listing: starting on somebody else's items and clicking "sell one like this" or creating a new listing from scratch, for instance.
But, yeah, I'm converted to Buy It Now as a buyer and a seller.
I avoid auction like the plague.
I feel like auctions should be auto-pay. Or, at least have an option to list them that way. This reminds me of the time I was selling football tickets and someone did this. I had to scramble to sell these things after the person bid and never paid.
Tickets are obviously worth nothing after the event. It was a major headache, and I almost didn't sell them at all.
Hadn’t use ebay for a long time and bought and sold a dozen items last month. Had to deal with scammers twice. One fake account winning an auction I was selling then failing to pay, forcing me to relist (I assume the scam is that a fraction of the users will ship before payment). Another fake account bidding seconds before the end on an auction I was bidding for a large amount, revealing everyone’s max bid limit, then cancelling the bid, and bidding £1 below my max bid limit to max me out (all within seconds). Unimpressed by ebay’ support reaction: “it is probably a new user who isn’t familiar with how ebay works”. Seriously? I even wondered if ebay wasn’t behind that fake account, then I thought that any decent programmer with access to the back end would do something more subtle than that to max out transaction prices, then I thought: but if it is the same guys who designed the rest of the website...