CCS Guide to Auctions

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A Guide To Auction Success

by Izzy Goodman

This guide is a free service provided by Complete Computer Services, Inc. It is copyrighted, which means you can not take extracts of it for your own use. You can link to it on your web site or auctions. If you wish to email us with comments or submit additional information, feel free. If we use your information, we will give you credit and a link to your web site. This guide explains auction etiquette, auction terms, bidding, completing the transaction and other such details for the novice. It also contains some tips helpful to the seasoned bidder. After you have read this guide, please visit our auctions and check out our excellent customer ratings and our many NO RESERVE items.

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Pay anyone by credit card and accept credit cards with no fees! Or send and receive funds via your checking account electronically. In some ways, these are safer than paying by credit card and in some ways they may not be. For detailed info on credit card rules, see the link for our payment service ratings.

Sellers - accept credit cards with no monthly minimums! A new type of merchant account uses a pay-per-use billing method. There are no monthly minimums or cancellation fees. Unlike Propay, Paypal and others, this is a REAL MERCHANT ACCOUNT that YOU CONTROL. There is no middleman to confuse things. You deal directly with the customer and any issues are handled between you and the customer or you and the card issuer. It is a fact that customers spend more when they can use their credit card and that merchants who take credit card directly (as opposed to those who use payment services) as viewed as more reputable. For more info, see our links on the left about merchant accounts.

Sites There are dozens if not hundreds of auction sites. Some are privately run by companies in order to sell their surplus, floor models, etc. The advantage of these is that you can pay by credit card (though with payment services, you can pay anyone by credit card) and you have some protection because you can depend upon the reputation of the company to deliver what they promised. We have had good experiences buying from numerous company sites with the exception of Auction Max, whose shipping charges are outrageous and whose customer service simply ignores requests for explanation and Zones Auction, whose merchandise descriptions change from the initial posting to the final bill. (click on the links to read the details.) The disadvantage of company sites is that their prices are usually higher, their items are usually discontinued or refurbished and their shipping rates are usually high.

Public sites such as Ebay, Yahoo, Cnet, Zdnet and numerous others allow private individuals to auction their own goods. The advantage is that you can usually pay less than you would at a private company site and the shipping charged is usually exactly what the seller paid or close to it. The disadvantage is that you are dealing with an unknown person in another state. If you pay by check or money order, you have little recourse if the seller doesn't deliver as promised. Our experience (shared by others) is that seller dishonesty on Internet auctions is much lower than the scare articles that keep appearing. But it is important to check the seller's rating (see later).

Registering

Before you can bid in an auction, you must register on the site. You are typically asked for your name, address and email. Then you choose an alias. This can be your real name or a nickname. It is the name that identifies you to the site. If you choose the name MONEYBAGS for example, when you check the items you have bid on, you will see your bids under the name MONEYBAGS. Some sites, particularly private ones, also ask for a credit card. On private sites, your credit card is charged when you win an auction. On sites such as Ebay, Yahoo and Cnet, your card number is not given to the vendor. It is up to you and the vendor to work out payment terms.

Protecting Yourself

1. Ratings and Preventing Fraud

Next to the alias of a buyer or seller is a number. This number is the rating. When you first join a site, your rating can be a star, the word "New" or 0. This means you have not made any transactions. After you successfully buy or sell something, you and the other party rate each other. A good rating earns you a point, a bad rating costs you a point and an average rating does not affect your number. You can only get 1 rating point per unique person you have dealt with. If you buy two items from the same seller, even if he rates you twice, you will only get one point. However, both comments will appear in your feedback. This is to prevent a situation where two people conspire to bid on each other's items in order to falsely increase their ratings. Before you bid on an item, check the seller's rating. Don't just look at the number. Click on the number next to the alias and see what previous customers reported.
Don't automatically reject a seller with a small number of bad ratings if there are a large number of good ones. Remember that almost every seller will at one time or another meet up with a bad bidder. There are always people who can never be satisfied no matter what you do. (After almost 50 excellent ratings, we finally ran into our one whiner. Fortunately, most people understood that 50 excellent ratings overcome one bad comment.) There are also snipers on the Net, people with nothing better to do than "win" auctions under phony names just so they can enter bad comments and destroy an innocent seller's reputation. So read the comments (particularly the bad ones, if any) and then decide if this is someone you can trust. There is a difference between a complaint from the customer who never got his merchandise or got something different than advertised and a complaint of a customer who just doesn't understand the rules. (Some customers expect COD shipments even though most auctions do NOT provide this. Some ask to pay in installments. We had someone in Romania "win" a 19 inch monitor and argue that our posting said "$25 shipping," completely ignoring the second half of the sentence which said "in the U.S." It is NOT the seller's fault that some people can't read.) If you have reservations, you might want to send an email to the seller and ask some questions.
Important: If a seller has many excellent ratings, read a few at the top and a few at the bottom and make sure this seller has been around for a while. Some sellers get friends or fake IDs to shill (make fake bids and "win" in order to post ratings). They usually pad their ratings quickly. A seller who has a lot of excellent ratings from new bidders all within a short time should make you suspicious.

Case Studies

Here is a nasty auction scam that takes advantage of the way egold works.

Egold is a payment service similar to paypal but with a few significant differences. 1) It is based on gold. When you open an egold account, you are actually buying a quantity of gold. If the price changes, the value in your account changes. 2) The price you pay depends upon the quantity purchased. The more you buy, the better price you get. 3) There is a minimum amount which must be purchased. 4) Payments are made to account numbers. You don't see the name of the recipient. 5) Payments are non-refundable. If you pay the wrong account by accident, it's too bad.

Because of these factors, it is common for people to open egold accounts with large purchases and then sell them in smaller blocks to investors who can't come up with the minimum purchase. There are also sellers who accept egold for their auctions. If you win one of their auctions and don't want to open an egold account, you might pay an existing account holder who accepts paypal to act as a middleman and ask him to then pay your seller.

A well known egold seller received several emails from someone telling him that some payments for egold were on their way and giving him an egold account number in which to deposit these payments. He then received some money orders and payments via other payment services, just as he had been told. He began depositing egold payments in the account that he had been instructed to fund. Along comes a money order with a note reading, "this is for the digital camera on ebay."

Now this egold seller does not sell anything on ebay. So he called the person who had included his name and phone number along with the money order. He was shocked to discover that a seller had been offering all sorts of popular and expensive items on ebay and instructing his winners to send checks, money orders and electronic payments to this egold seller. The egold seller had then sent off non-refundable payments to an annonymous egold account. The actual scammer remains completely untraceable and the egold seller is on the hook for a few thousand dollars.

The moral of the story:

-know who you are doing business with. Buyers should not have been bidding on the expensive items of a brand new seller with a hotmail address and no ratings.

-always include some basic information with a payment, particularly who you are and what the payment is for. If the first few buyers had done this, the whole scheme would never have worked.

A seller offered digital cameras and other high priced items on a number of auction sites at prices lower than anyone else. He accepted credit cards, so his customers felt safe. He had a number of excellent ratings. What he did was order the camera from another Internet site and use the customer's own credit card to pay for it. Since the card was registered to the same address the item was delivered, the site processed the order. Then the seller came back to the same site and used the same account and credit card to order more merchandise, this time to his own PO box or to other customers. Since the account had been verified, the site accepted the orders. His auction "winners" were receiving their merchandise and posting good feedback, so others felt comfortable ordering from him until the bill arrived from their credit card company for not one camera at $300, but two or three cameras at $400 each. What is worse is that most credit cards protect you against loss or theft but not against a charge where you gave the number to someone and where you actually received merchandise. So the victims could not stop some of the charges because the merchants that placed them had sent out the goods.
Again, such a fraud can only be done quickly. The seller can not continue doing this for several months because as soon as the first fraudulent charge was discovered, the auction sites and investigators began working to shut him down. So if a seller has many positive ratings, few bad ones and has been around for a while, you can usually trust him or her.
Note: Some of the information in the next paragraph no longer applies. On January 10, 2001, yahoo began charging sellers listing fees. Because of this and the many complaints about Yahoo, many predict that Yahoo will become a ghost town. I am no longer posting auctions on Yahoo.

Warning: Yahoo in particular has probably the highest fraud rate of any Internet auction site. Sellers who have been kicked off other sites and sellers that law enforcement agencies are tracking down with the help of Ebay, Amazon and others are still operating with impugnity on Yahoo. Yahoo claims that they have no responsibility for anything that happens on their site. The reason fraud is so rampant is due to the fact that 1) Yahoo does NO verification of users' IDs. User can enter phony names, addresses and emails that don't exist and Yahoo will accept them. As someone proved to me, you can register on Yahoo with a completely false address including non-existent city and zip code and then verify yourself using someone else's credit card. Considering that any waiter or clerk has access to lots of credit card numbers, Yahoo verification is a joke. 2) Yahoo does not see their auctions as a revenue source. They make their money from advertisers and advertisers pay by the number of visitors to the site. So Yahoo only cares about getting more visitors. They don't care that many of them are frauds masquerading under fake IDs. Sellers have complained to Yahoo for months and all they get are canned responses. Once in a while a Yahoo spokesman will say something to the effect of "if you don't like it - leave." So sellers at Yahoo and especially bidders should be warned to be extremely careful.
One Yahoo seller appeared and started selling expensive jewelry that he claimed was priced well below market value. His first batch of auctions all closed on the same day. All the winning bids from all new bidders were placed within minutes of each other. Minutes later, every winning bidder had posted nearly identical feedback stating that they had received their merchandise, had it appraised and it was worth much more than they paid. This obvious shilling didn't fool the savvy but some novices may be taken in by this.

One Yahoo seller had a rating of 40, which led some people to place bids. The winners paid for their merchandise with money orders and received nothing. A close look at the feedback shows that it was all for buying, not selling. At last count, this person was down to 20 after all the negs.

One Yahoo seller had a rating of ten. Folks started buying expensive items. Those who paid with money orders received nothing. Those who paid through Paypal received the wrong items. One person bought a 40 gigabyte hard drive and received and old, broken 540 megabyte hard drive. Because failure to ship is grounds for a charge back with Paypal, this seller had to send something to receive proof of shipment. A closer look at his feedback revealled that his ten rating came from the sales of pirated software at $5 each. He made sure to send out his $50 worth of sales in order to build up his feedback so he could cheat the next group of customers out of hundreds of dollars.

One sign of possible fraud is when the seller is auctioning off expensive items in Dutch format. In a regular auction, there is one item being sold. Someone bids $400, the next person $410, the next $420. If the auction ended at that point, the camera is sold at $420. In a Dutch auction several of the item are being offered. Suppose someone is selling 3 cameras at a Dutch auction. The first person bids $400. The next person bids $400. The third person bids $400. All three cameras are now sold at $400 each. A genuine seller is looking to maximize profits. It would be rare to put an expensive item on Dutch auction. He would rather sell one at $420 one week and then another the next and another the next. However, a scammer wants to take as many victims as possible. Since he will not actually be shipping the merchandise, he would rather take 3 bidders for $1200 quickly. Otherwise the first bidder would put up the negative rating and he would never get the second victim. Remember, this is only an indicator. I am not saying that anyone who does this is automatically a crook.

Fraud and Protection

The safest method of Internet payment used to be a credit card, because the seller must have a merchant account, which means a bank has verified the seller and has access to the account. However, with the rapid growth of the Net, there are companies offering quick and easy credit card accounts and some unscrupulous vendors have managed to obtain them. There are also vendors who pretend to have a credit card account but what they do is use your card to charge the order with someone else. Another thing to worry about, how safe will your credit information be if you are giving it to dozens of vendors over the Net? All it takes is one bad employee or one insecure system and you can have a credit nightmare. So if you feel the least bit uncomfortable with sending this seller a check, don't assume that you can freely give him your credit card. That is why the trend today is to open an account with a third party payment service.

Payment services: The service stores your information on a secure server and handles charging your card and paying the vendor. The vendor never sees your information. Since the vendor has been verified by the service and they have access to his credit card or bank account, they can handle getting back your money in the event of a fraud. If they do not cooperate with you, you always have the threat of a charge back. Read my ratings of payment services, using the link on the left.

Because the merchant is not charging you directly, (the service charges you and then pays the merchant), it may be easier or more difficult to do a charge back. Some credit cards do not allow you to use a third party service and will refuse a charge back, no matter how justified, if you do so. Some credit cards (Discover, Amex and even a few Visa and Mastercard issuers) consider the merchant the payment service itself. Since they carried out the service according to your request, you got what you paid for. If you have used your credit card to buy a money order and then used that money order to pay for merchandise you never received, you can not charge back the purchase of the money order. So you should always check out the seller's ratings. However, because the service verifies the merchant in several ways (or is supposed to), they know who the person is, have access to his credit card and often his bank account. So they may be able to retrieve your money if the seller can not prove that he shipped the item. It is much more difficult for a merchant to commit fraud if he is paid via a service than if he is paid via check or money order.

As a general piece of advice, don't be quick to charge things back. When a bank sees a large number of charge backs for one customer, particularly when they are later reversed, they stop taking them seriously and it could affect your credit rating. Unless you have reason to believe that the merchant is defrauding you, your first recourse is to contact the merchant and work it out. The charge on your statement often contains the merchant's phone number. We don't mind when someone calls us to question a charge we placed on their card (and so far we have never had to be reminded to place a credit when due). But we do mind when someone places a charge back. We have had only three charge backs. Twice the customer simply forgot what the charge was for. Had they called us, we could have explained it. Instead, they involved our bank and their bank and made us research our files for the paperwork to prove the charge was warranted. I also suspect it may somehow affect our rating with the merchant bank. The third time may have been a fraud attempt, I am still not sure, but we presented our proof and the charge back was denied.
In general, fraud on the Internet is much lower than scare articles would have you believe. For every scam on the Net, there are hundreds taking place off the Net. There are electronics stores that sell used goods as new. There are companies (such as cable and phone) that stick small charges on your credit card and hope you won't notice. Why is it safer to hand your credit card to a minimum wage clerk or waiter than it is to give it to a reputable dealer's web site? My credit card was once charged over $300 for items I never bought. The clerk at the store had recorded some CC numbers and then charged items to those cards weeks later. It did not take the Internet or a computer to do this. Had the charge been $30 or so, I would have assumed my wife made the purchase. Since then, I check every statement carefully. Being careful is a good practice, on the Internet or off. Incidentally, when your credit card is used for a purchase where it was not physically present, such as a mail order or Internet sale, the seller is responsible to verify that the merchandise was shipped to the address of the credit card. The seller assumes all risk if it is shipped elsewhere. So if your card is "hacked" and used to make purchases, unless the thief had it shipped to your house, you will not be responsible for the payment.

2. Escrow

For sellers who don't accept credit cards or (though I personally would not deal with sellers who only accept check or money order), there is another option to protect the buyer. There are third-party companies that offer escrow services. The buyer sends payment to the escrow service. The escrow service notifies the seller. The seller ships the item. When the buyer reports that the item has been received, the escrow service sends the payment to the seller. Some escrow services have the item shipped to them and they forward the item to the buyer and the payment to the seller. Escrow services typically charge a percent of the item cost and shipping charges, if applicable. The buyer usually pays this charge, since it is for the buyer's protection. Some sellers will pay half the cost.
My one experience with Iescrow (which changed their name to Tradenable and may have changed their name to Escrow.com) was miserable. I came to the conclusion that though Iescrow pretends to be impartial, they are firmly on the side of the person who has the most active account with them. A seller offered me 100 cdrws (rewritable cd disks). Since he did not take credit cards and Paypal wasn't around then, at his insistence we went through Iescrow. What he sent me was CDRs (write once) which are much cheaper. When I emailed him, he responded and admitted that 1) it was his mistake and 2) CDRs were 20 cents cheaper than CDRWs. Iescrow told me that I had 48 hours to return them at my expense and they would refund me the cost of the item but I would have to pay the seller's shipping. I would be out over $40 for his mistake. I emailed the seller and he agreed to lower the price if I kept them. I told him that I didn't need 100, so I would keep 50. I sent 50 back and then the seller refused to lower the price. Though I forwarded the seller's letters to Iescrow, they told me that I had to send the other 50 back at my expense or I would have to pay the FULL AMOUNT for the 100. The seller gouged me for the price of 50 cdrws plus his shipping and I had no recourse. To add insult to injury, it took Iescrow several weeks and a half dozen emails from me before they finally credited my account. I guess I could have charged it back, but it was not worth getting into a battle over so I swallowed it. But I did inform Iescrow that I would be warning people that using them offered no protection.

1-Click Some sites have their own escrow service. Amazon has one called 1-click. If the seller agrees to accept it, the little icon appears right next to the item. When the auction ends, the buyer clicks the icon, enters the credit card number and the seller is notified immediately. Since Amazon has the seller's information and credit card, the buyer is protected.

Beware of Escrow Scams A new type of scam involves the buyer or seller setting up a fake escrow service. The victim goes to what appears to be an escrow site, sends payment or is told that payment has been received and ships the item. The escrow service disappears and either the buyer is out the funds or the seller is out the item.

Personally, with the availability of payment services, I would not deal with a seller who insists on money orders or checks. I also don't understand why people insist on taking the worst possible deal. Why pay for a money order, pay the postage to mail it out, wait an extra few days for the seller to get it before the merchandise is shipped and take the risk that it gets lost in the mail or you will never receive your merchandise and will be unable to trace the seller? Short of sending cash through the mail, money orders offer the worst of all possible methods and I can think of not one good reason to use them.

Auction Terms

Bid Assist

Different sites call this by different names (proxy, agent) but the result is the same. Suppose a camera is now at $50 and you would like to pay up to $200 for it. You can bid $55 now, wait to be outbid, come back and bid $60, wait some more, come back and bid $65. Or you can use bid assist and bid $200. Bid assist will calculate the minimum amount necessary to maintain the win, up to your maximum. If someone bids $60, it will automatically raise your bid to $61 (or $65, depending on the minimum increment). It will keep raising your bid until you have reached your limit. Then you will get an email informing you that you have been outbid. Another nice feature of bid assist is that ties go to the first bidder. If you got in your bid assist before someone else, if you both have the same maximum bid, yours will win.

Buy Price, Buy-It-Now or asking price

Some sites allow the seller to set a buy price. Ebay has started a buy-it-now price. It works differently on different sites. On Yahoo when this price is reached, the auction closes immediately. On ebay this only happens if this if the first bid made or if this is the first bid to go over the reserve price (see below). Once another bid has been made which meets the reserve (or if there is no reserve), the buy-it-now price no longer works. Usually, sellers will set this at an abnormally high figure. We set our buy price at the average retail price we find for the item at other sites. If you bid on our items, you can (and often do) win it for less. If you are in a hurry and don't want to wait for the auction to end, you can bid the buy price and get it immediately. Because we like to end our auctions quickly, we usually offer an incentive to bid the buy price. It is usually only a few dollars more than the starting price plus shipping, includes shipping and a free gift that complements the purchase, such as free photo editing software with a digital camera purchase.

Reserve Price

The seller sets a minimum price at which the item will sell. You bid $100 on a digital camera. You had the highest bid at the auction close. However, the seller set a reserve price of $200. That means that if the high bid did not reach $200, the item did not sell. We do not use reserve prices because we find it a waste of time. If we won't sell the item for less than $200, then the bidding should start at $200. Starting it at $50 only wastes bidders' time. Sometimes a novice bidder will even believe he won it at that price and send nasty emails to the seller.

Sniping

Some people cry about this but sellers love it. These are bidders who jump in with seconds to go. There is nothing illegal or immoral about this. The winning bid always goes to the person who bid highest, whether he was the first bid or the last.

Bidding Tips

1. Get the Details

Once you have identified the items that you are interested in and the sellers you are prepared to deal with, read the item descriptions. Is it new or used? What kind of warranty does it have? Will the seller take credit cards, personal checks or just money orders? Will the seller allow escrow or share the cost? Read the details carefully. Sometimes an unscrupulous seller will bury an important fact, such as the item being used or refurbished, in middle of a long paragraph or leave it out altogether. Get all your questions answered before you bid.
Note that some sites like Yahoo have a question section with each item. You can post questions to the seller here. If the seller has an email ID posted, we advise against using the "ask a question" feature. Email is so much more effective. 1) Those question boxes are small. You don't have the room or the time to frame your questions properly. 2) When the seller responds, everybody who reads that auction will see your question. We have had bidders leave personal information there, such as their name, address and phone number. There are lots of kooks out there and you don't want to publicize this info. Some novices inadvertently revealled that they were new at this from their questions. Other unscrupulous people, seeing this, could now contact them and possibly swindle them. 3) In order to answer your question, the seller would have to log back into the auction and read it. I don't review every one of my auctions every day. I will respond to my email quickly. 4) One way to see how service oriented your seller is would be to email and see how quickly he responds and if he takes the time to address your question.

2. Get the Price

When you are ready to bid, you should know the value of the item. We have seen people get so carried away with winning that they bid more than the item would cost in a store. Some sellers would happily take the money. We want our customers to feel that they got a bargain. A few times we had to tell the customer, "Your bid was too high, so we are charging you less." One customer bid $450 on a camera that we knew was available for $400 on another site. He even ignored our "recommended buy price". Another seller might not have been so understanding, but we gave it to him for $400. Before you bid, do your homework.
Remember that sellers are not guaranteeing that they are selling at the lowest price. A seller once complained to me that a buyer bid on his auction and then, before even contacting the seller, posted a bad rating stating that the seller was ripping him off because he found it cheaper elsewhere. It is not the seller's fault that the buyer bid too high. But that bad rating stayed there, affecting the seller's reputation.

3. Winning Tips

You now have selected the item and know its value. The auction ends in several days. Some people wait until the last minute to place their bid. This way they don't have to wait a few days to see if they will win. My strategy is to come in early and bid the maximum that I want to spend. Because of the bid assist feature, my bid will continue to be raised until I have reached the maximum I want to spend. When I am informed that I have been outbid, I don't bother going back and raising my bid because I know I have reached my maximum. I don't get carried away and spend more than the item is worth. But since I got in the early bid, I will win any ties. This is particularly good on no reserve auctions. If I see an item that I know is worth $200, I can bid a maximum of $175. If no one outbids me, I can win, and have, sometimes for less than I expected.

Closing the Deal

Once you have won, it is important to close the deal quickly. Earlier, I discussed seller dishonesty. I have found that buyer dishonesty is much higher. Though (with 2 exception in over 300 auctions) we have only excellent ratings on our Yahoo and ebay auctions from customers, indicating that all our customers are happy with their purchases, we have had numerous buyers bid under aliases and then not respond when it came time to complete the transactions. I am sure these people felt that we weren't losing anything because we could always find another customer. They are wrong. Most auction sites charge a fee for posting an item and a percentage of the sale amount. We have stopped posting items on certain sites because of the high percentage of phoney buyers and the charges we incurred posting transactions that didn't complete. Even on free sites, when we sell big ticket items like digital cameras, we have to keep these on hand in order to ship them out when payment is received. It is frustrating when a customer walks in and we have to say that we are out of stock, while we are holding an item for a bidder who never completes the transaction. So for some auctions we started posting items that we did not have on hand but expected to be able to order at a moment's notice. Then occasionally we run into a problem when the item is out of stock. Now we include in our auctions the information about whether this is an in-stock item or one being ordered and expected delivery to the customer.

Email Notification

When you receive your merchandise, it is good practice to email the seller and let him or her know. We sell many items drop shipped directly from the distributor. We don't know when they arrive. We ask our customers to email us, but many don't. Since we can't track every item we sell, we wait until the customer emails us that he hasn't received it before looking into it. We tell our customers to contact us in a week. It is frustrating when a customer complains two weeks later that the item hasn't arrived. It delays the tracking and it makes the customer wait longer. If everyone emailed when their item arrived, we could check them off a list and know who was still outstanding. An order we placed once got misplaced at the distributor. It was never sent. The customer waited over two weeks and then sent a threatening email. There was no call for that. Had he notified us in five days as instructed, he would have had his item sooner. We had another fedex'd to him immediately.

Successful auction final step - Post Feedback

When the transaction is complete, go back to the auction and post feedback. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT. Feedback is what makes you a contributing member to the community. You relied on a seller's feedback before you made your bid. Now have the same courtesy for those who follow. If the seller fulfilled his side of the deal, your positive feedback is your show of appreciation. The positive feedback the seller will post for you will tell other sellers that you are a good customer. Some sites allow sellers to block certain customers from bidding. We used to post customer feedback immediately after receiving payment. Since we have discovered that even after reminders, only about 1 in 10 bothered to post feedback on us, we now only post feedback for those who post feedback on us. If the customer does not post feedback after several reminders, we will change our rating to neutral, with the notation "could not be bothered to leave feedback."
Remember, getting your merchandise is not necessarilly the end of the deal. What if there is a problem later? Most sellers state that the item is covered by the manufacturer's warranty and their responsibility ends. However, getting service from the manufacturer can take weeks. For our customers, we have gone the extra mile. We have instructed our distributors to send an immediate replacement before waiting for the defective item to come back. We have shipped replacements out of our own stock and trusted the customer to return the bad one. Naturally, we feel more inclined to do this for our good customers - the ones who took the time to email us that the item was received and posted feedback. Our thinking is: if a customer can't take the minute necessary to post feedback, how can we be sure that he will take the time to package and ship out the defective item if he had already received the replacement?

Dealing With Problems

When the item arrives, check it carefully. If you feel it is not as described, contact the seller immediately. Try to work things out with the seller before posting bad feedback, charging back to your credit card or taking some action that has serious consequences to your credibility. Your own credit card company won't take you seriously if you are too quick to charge back items. Only if you see that the seller is refusing to deal with the situation should you take these measures. We have sometimes been disappointed with what we received from an auction and an email to the seller was all it took to correct the problem. When you put a black mark on the seller's rating or charge back the transaction on your credit card, which costs the seller a fee, the seller will not be as willing to help you. When you do email, state your problem calmly. Have someone else read the letter before you send it. People do not respond well to threats and insults.

If all else fails, you can do any or all of the following: 1) Contact the auction site where you bid and tell them about your experience. 2) Post bad feedback for the seller 3) Contact the Better Business Bureau (this only works if the seller is a commercial business and not a private party. Even then, the BBB does not enforce laws. They can only give the seller a bad rating in their books. 4) If there was a serious fraud involved, contact the Attorney General of the seller's state or any other law enforcement agency you believe should be informed about this.

Warranties

Most items sold on public auction sites are covered by a manufacturer's warranty only. If a problem develops, you must contact the manufacturer. If the seller is a company (as opposed to an individual), you might have a 30 or 60-day warranty, but do not assume that you do. Even if it arrives DOA (dead on arrival), you might have to deal with the manufacturer directly. In any case, you will have to return it to someone, either the seller or the manufacturer. Do not expect that it will be picked up from your home at someone else's expense. Similarly, you would have to return a defective item to the store where it was purchased and the store will not pick it up from your house. Some sellers are very clear on their auction policies and some aren't. When in doubt, ask your quesions or assume all responsibility for dealing with the manufacturer. Our auction policies are clear and you can link to them from any of our auctions. See the link for our auction and sales terms.

Which Sites

Now that you have read this guide, which sites should you visit? I don't want to recommend any private site over any other because there are too many coming and going. Each site is just a little different and has its good points and its bad points. I don't happen to like sites where the bidding starts at $1 and that $1 figure never changes. When you go back to the site, it still shows all the items at $1. Only after you click on the item do you see that the current bid is $100. This means that you have to click on every item to find out what the real bid is. I don't like sites that send you an email every time your bid assist raises your bid. I have emailed these sites several times and all they can do is say that they have no control over this feature. What laziness! All it takes is a simple program change. Needless to say I have stopped visiting these sites because I want to concentrate on critical emails without wading through hundreds of useless ones.

Haggle, Amazon, Ebay, Yahoo

These are public sites, where anyone can post items for sale. We have tried them all and many others. Ebay charges a listing fee for simply posting the item and Yahoo decided to imitate. In addition, ebay charges a commission on the sale. This means that the seller must take these into account when setting his price. Our customers have remarked, "I saw the same item on Ebay, but it was more money." Naturally. The cost of the posting and commission are passed on to the customer. Ebay is huge. There are MILLIONS of items for sale. It is so huge, that you can get lost looking for something. Sometimes, too many choices and too many people looking for deals is just too much. When I was looking for a specific item on Ebay, I found dozens. I was afraid to bid too high because I might win more than one and I only needed one. So I bid low and won nothing. I have bought a few items on Ebay but it took a great deal of time and effort. Often the only way to shop there is to snipe. But too many other people know this. Sometimes folks get into a bidding war and the item sells for more than list price.

Yahoo and Amazon require that the buyer enter a credit card number. Ebay requires it if the buyer has a "free" email account. Yahoo does not verify the number. Savvy folks are able to sign on using other people's cards. On all sites this number is not passed on to the vendor. The buyer is still free to renege on the deal and often does. There does not seem to be any penalty and the sellers seem to have no recourse. While ebay and Amazon show the seller the email ID of all bidders, Yahoo and others protect the bidder's email ID from the seller until the auction ends. If something occurs during the auction that the buyer needs to know, the seller has no way of contacting him. Cnet will only show the winning bidder at the end of the auction. In one of my auctions for an expensive digital camera, the winner reneged. I could not get the email of the runner-up, so I could not offer it to him. It is a good idea to always email the seller when you place a bid on an auction, just so you can be contacted. If you lose the auction by a small amount, you can always ask the seller if he has another one. Sometimes I win auctions this way even when I am the runner-up.

Yahoo auctions were completely free to buyer and seller. Prices were lower because there are no commissions. This is why we originally chose to consolidate all our auctions and particularly our NO RESERVE auctions on Yahoo. However, because Yahoo does no verification at all, it is very easy for buyers and sellers to create phoney IDs. Because of the high number of phoney bidders, we only accepted bids from someone with a positive rating or someone who emails us upon bidding. Other bids were sometimes cancelled. Now that Yahoo has stupidly started charging listing fees which are not refundable even if the winning bidder deadbeats, we won't be listing there.

Our ebay boycott: We did list items regularly on ebay, but ebay has instituted a number of insane policies. Ebay always had a rule against keyword spamming. This is adding words to your auctions that don't apply, just to get folks to look. For example, someone selling a Hong Kong knockoff camera might put in his title "just like a Sony," in the hope that a buyer looking for a Sony would visit his auction. This is annoying to bidders looking for a real Sony. It is also stupid for the seller because tricking someone into clicking on an auction does not reflect well on his honesty and is not a good way to attract customers. But ebay has taken the rule to a ridiculous length. We sell batteries that are specific to Toshiba PDR and Fuji MX cameras. We listed these as "batteries for the Toshiba PDR-M4/M5/M70" and separately as "batteries for Fuji MX-2700/2900." Ebay cancelled these auctions without notice. It took a week for them to tell us that they were cancelled for keyword spamming. Since we are not selling Toshiba PDR-M4 cameras, we can't name it. We asked them repeatedly how we are supposed to sell a battery for the M4 if we can't name the camera. They insisted that we can only list "battery" without naming the camera. We think anyone would agree this is incredibly stupid. In addition, we pointed out that there are a dozen other sellers with similar listings and only our auctions appear to have been singled out. After several weeks of back and forth, ebay finally said we can list a camera in the title but no other cameras in the body. We started doing that and they shut us down for mentioning that the C2it payment service gives $10 back on the first payment. At no time in the past did they ever say it was against the rules to mention this. Since then they have left our auctions alone. But if this kind of nonsense happens again, we will join the ranks of sellers who have boycotted ebay.

Recently an ebay shooting star (seller with over 10,000 feedbacks) posted an auction on ebay in which he lambasted ebay for their insane policies (Jacket auction). Though that auction was shut down, several more popped up to take its place. These auctions even received coverage (Auctionbytes article and Cnet article). As fast as ebay is shutting them down, others are coming up. Will ebay get the message? Unfortunately, I don't think so. Our July 2001 newsletter covered this in detail.

Now that you have read this guide, feel free to email us with your comments. Tell us if there are any other topics you would like us to cover. Sign on to our mailing list and receive our free monthly newsletter with information about computers, auctions and internet deals.

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