OT: Ebay frustration, winners not making contact

[wolves3012]

Originally Posted by jsrockit

I always find it funny when I bid on an item (say $500 item) and find out that the previous bidder put in a bid of $18.34 as their max. What were they hoping for?

Plenty of people bid low amounts, especially on 0.99-start things. They don't want the item, but if no-one else bids they get the bargain and re-sell. If you bid on 100 items and (say) 2 get no higher bids, you may be able to make a profit.

I once bought an item worth about £15 for 99p because no-one else bid. The seller clearly wasn't happy but grudgingly sent the item. I was prepared to pay a fair price but just got lucky, it's hardly my fault no-one else bid and he chose the 99p start. I also got a nice auto-flashgun for 99p as sole bidder. I even offered the seller excess postage because I felt he'd lost out but he just said "you win some, you lose some, it's ok".

[miatab]

Here's the other side- the buyer's side! Couple weeks back I won an auction for an item I wanted for parts to replace same non-functioning parts on my own item. I placed a max bid of 105 bucks, but I got the item for about half that. Almost opened a bottle of wine to celebrate, then got a badly written email from the French Canadian seller telling me not to pay because her place had been burgled and "lots of my stuff is gone." I noticed that none of her other stuff was removed from eBay, just the item I won. AFTER the auction closed. Never emailed me in the two days of the auction to tell me about the Burglary. I told her, "I'm old but I'm not stupid." If she'd been in range I'd have kicked her arse as high as her expectations for the item. So I found an on-line store and bought the part I needed for 15 bucks, ten bucks postage, delivered in three days. There are bad *******s on both sides operating against the spirit of eBay.