Underhand / Bad Trading Practices on ebay

As is known, I do get a lot of small electronic parts from the Far East on ebay. Normally, this isnt much of a problem. Some items are poor copies, some just dont work, and some get lost on the voyage around the world. On the whole, the sellers normally deal with these issues well.

But ive started to become very annoyed by a couple of practices ive noticed from the Far East sellers which, although whether they actually infringe ebays selling policies is open to debate, are to me clearly infringements of the morality of trading.

Below is a very recent example of one of these



Spot the difference

Take a look at the counter-offer price from the seller, now look at the 'Buy It Now' price. Spot the difference? No - because there isnt one! This is something I have been seeing from many sellers recently, particularly in relation to Arduinos and other small electronics modules.

To me, if you are going to offer a 'Best Offer' option, then you should be prepared to consider the offer and accept something somewhere between 10 to 50% off. But these sellers are sending counter offers that are either exactly the Buy It Now price, or a discount of 1%! Sorry, but as far as I am concerned, and I would imagine many others as well, 1% is NOT a discout! Its an INSULT! YOU want to sell us your stock - dont insult your potential buyers!

It does piss me off. These sellers are making an 'offer' to draw buyers, and then just wasting the buyers time! Sadly there is no easy way to report this underhand practice to ebay, so I have done so using the 'Tell us what you think' link at the top of the search page. I would strongly suggest that my readers do the same, and share this bad practice around!

Another very annoying and insulting practice, which I am sure does contravene ebays selling practices, is that of making a listing with the desired product in the title and its picture, but then when you go to the sale page, finding a drop down list under which the listed item is much more expensive, and another useless or unwanted item (such as a few SIL pins) is listed at the advertised price



Sale of Nano yes?

Example above is from the search page. No hint that the Nano isnt the item for 99p is there? It is perfectly reasonable to expect the higher price to be for a multiple. But no...

What is on offer for 99p is some generic amplifier board. But that isnt mentioned in the title, or hinted at in the photo! Instead the actual Arduino is £3! And thats more expensive than most of the sellers who are listing them honourably! To me this is very underhand and tantamount to false pretences.

Please, report these bad practices where you see them! As if its not bad enough the uncontrolled level of shill bidding and multiple parallel accounts used to smooth out the bad feedback, or the 'instructions' sent by the seller to 'only leave full 5 star positive feedback' which is definately against ebay policy!