Penny is right about auction sniper!

Penny is right - the Sniper situation does not seem very fair - BUT it's there and many people are using it - so like they say in New York - "you gotta be in it to win it!". You may not like it - but people are pulling the rug out from under you - I doubt that ebay can do anything about it - there are quite a few "sniper" websites and obviously nothing has been done to get rid of them.

What I would like to do though is give some advice about bidding - I guess telling people these things may not be the smartest thing to do - afterall, I am a seller and always want the highest price, but I love ebay, I love the people that buy from me and perhaps I'm just a nice person who loves to share the things I have already learned.

I started out years ago buying on ebay - and have been burned 2-1/2 times. The 1/2 is a whole other story that I will save for another time. The other two times you know about as I have already written about them. I can't count the number of wonderful things that I have purchased though and what great deals I have gotten - so the following is a little of what I have learned along the way.......

Know who you are buying from - I think that is the most important thing. You can only get to know the person by reading his/her feedback carefully. There is a lot of information there....first the number of feedbacks are very important. Not just the number of feedbacks - but the number of feedback from BUYERS. At the top of the feedback page is a place for you to select JUST feedback from buyers - that's what you want. You want to hear what the people who have purchased things from this seller have to say. If the person has 100 feedbacks from sellers - well that will just tell you that this person buys things and pays for them - you want to know what they have sold and how honest they have been.

You want to buy from someone who has been selling for awhile. I got burned the two times by people who had very few feedbacks from buyers. I should have known better - but both times I just couldn't resist the "great deal"! I knew better - but trusted more in ebay than in them. So both times I got screwed!

OK - so now you see that there are a number of good feedbacks. Now you want to see the type of items this seller has been selling. Click on the auction numbers and see what kinds of things he/she has been selling. Is the item you are interested in a similar type of item? I like to feel that the seller I'm doing business with has been selling the same types of things (and a lot of them) - generally high end. That tells me that he/she knows what they are doing and that they can be trusted. That's why some of my "watchers" emailed me when they saw all kinds of electronics listed on my site - they knew something was wrong - I don't sell electronics! I sell high end women's clothing and accessories. I thank them again for the warnings - luckily I had already caught on to that criminal.*

Once I saw a fabulous Ostrich CHANEL handbag (classic style) - it was fabulous! I could see from the photos that it was indeed very real and very wonderful. How do you start something like this at around $25? OK - some people do that - no reserve! Heaven! This must be heaven! There were already about 35 bids and it was still only about $350 - how could this be? A bag like this could cost as much as $5000 (maybe even more!). So I did a search of the other items this person was selling and what do I see? This seller had about 35 items on at that time. Lots of silly things - none of them very valuable and things with no bids or very few bids. There was one other handbag - a Vuitton Alma in Red Epi. Now that was also still at a low price (definitely real) and also had about 35 bids. So now I look at the bidders (they do show user names) and what do I see - the same person was bidding on both bags. So now I check this bidder and look to see what kind of items this person has been buying. No, no bags like this - in fact, nothing like this. $5 items and in the last 5 years that this person had been on ebay - had only bought a few things - none of them more than $5.

What is the moral of this story? These people were in cahoots - one was bidding to raise the bids - but had no intention of buying the bags (of course). I reported the situation to ebay and both people were removed from ebay. Not before the CHANEL bag was sold though. I would not bid on it no matter how good the deal - I would not deal with anyone who would do that. The bag went for about $750 (someone got a really GREAT deal - if they ever got it) and I'm glad that the cheating seller didn't get any more than that! Now that I think about it - I would have to wonder if the bag ever got shipped.......

But you see - you do have to be careful.

OK - so far I've only given you a little bit of advice. Tomorrow I'll try to give a little more. Most of all though - be careful! Try to get a good idea of who you are dealing with and what they have sold already. The thing that I appreciate so much is that people know that I am honest, that I love ebay and that I love seeing people get great things!

*A sidenote - yesterday on the train into the city I helped a young woman who had much too much baggage - she was heading back to Paris (of course that is a whole other story) but it turned out that she was an attorney working for Microsoft and one of the things that she is involved in is trying to prosecute some of these pirates - that made me happy - to know that there are people out there trying to catch these creeps!