Ebay: Safety Through Education

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“Ebay is known for facilitating fantastic deals for buyers.Of course this is true, since this avenue of savings contributes greatly to Ebay’s success. But this fairy tale is meant only for those who are educated on Ebay. Ebay is home to “”Shill Bidders”” who boost prices illegally, tricking uneducated shoppers out of their savings. Everyone can easily see the red flags of these forms of ‘shill bid’ online auctions with a few basic online education from a fantastic tutorial(s) as well as the details out of this post.

Familiarize these terms:

Reserve Price Auctions: A variation of a normal auction, you are able to set a price you will not sell your item below, giving an insurance to the seller that they are not obligated to sell if the desired price is not reached.

Shill Bidder: A fraudulent and illegal action of creating false accounts to increase the price of their own item.

Shill System: The organization of false accounts and real friend accounts that intermingle bids with true bidders to inflate the price.

Shill Bidder Motive:

First you should be aware the objective powering a shill bidder. When a Shill Bidder goes to produce an auction, they will more often than not create the auction without a reserve price, starting with a surprisingly low price (e.g A XBOX for $1.00 beginning bid). This in turn draws in a lot of buyers, that believe they’ll be in a position to win the XBOX for perhaps… $30.00. These buyers will then begin bidding in opposition to each other in a frenzy.

The System:

The shill bidder may not have to create false accounts to bid against the users, because the chaos of all the real users may reach the optimum price. This is unlikely because shill bidders always aim for preposterous values. The Shill Bidder will then bid (or have his friend bid) on his own product, while other bidders bid against someone who has nothing to lose (or in fact does not exist). The Shill Bidder simply hopes that a real bidder ends up winning the auction and paying the ultimate price.

Spotting Shill Auctions:

Now you may be asking… “How do I spot this?”. Starting at a beginner’s level, you can spot ‘shill bidders’ by viewing their past auction history. If the previous winners of the seller’s past history is desolate of activity and feedback, that is a red flag. At a more professional level (which is tougher to spot) the Shill Bidder will have friends bid on their items, making it increasingly hard to pin point (as there are many factors that go into this). Or worst, they may have created accounts that have a high level of feedback specifically done to dupe the bidders (Professional level). Ebay training and help websites are a great place to begin your beginner or in depth knowledge on Ebay.

Here are some tips to spot shill bidders on eBay:

The vendors account has been online for less than 12 months.

The seller has attained little or no feedback at all.

The vendor has continual positive feedback from a single user in specific, correlating to a suspiciously broad range of items, like a plasma Tv in 1 transaction and a stuffed animal in the next. Be sure to learn how to better sell items on ebay with a variety of training sites out there.

For more details please visit Online Learning and online help.

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