ebay - new terms to the User Agreement

[omens]

What if the seller was selling the lens because he was desperate for money to keep house and home. I would have walked away and just chalked it up. To ruin someone in that way is awful and quite frankly morally bankrupt.

The seller had a few options on ebay:
- sell for whatever the highest bid is (even if it's £10)
- sell but add a minimum reserve (eg £4000) that the buyer is willing to go for
- set a buy it now price eg £4500

There are probably more but I've only ever sold once on ebay and it didn't leave me feeling confident.

 

[john.margetts]

The intelligent thing is to set the opening bid at the least you are willing to accept. The problem with low starting bids and a reserve is that a single bidder cannot up the starting bid to reach the reserve without a second bidder.

 

[Angelboy]

The intelligent thing is to set the opening bid at the least you are willing to accept. The problem with low starting bids and a reserve is that a single bidder cannot up the starting bid to reach the reserve without a second bidder.

That's one way but eBay charge you a percentage of the value of the starting price. Without checking I wouldn't know what £5k starting price would be but I'd suggest it being quite high.

If you set a reserve with a low starting price then you're not obligated to sell - that's what the reserve is for - but you can offer a 'second chance offer' to a buyer with a different price - it think you can anyway. I know if you sell an item to a high bidder for say £105 and for some reason the deal doesn't go through then you can offer it to the next heights bidder for the price they bid.

Either way, to set the price high or to set a minimum reserve means more up front costs to eBay. What the seller of the lens probably did was set the price low, to get people's interest, and then have no reserve, giving the bidders the opportunity to be able to get a potentially cheap deal. So on the day, the market dictated the price of the lens to be £3400 - £1600 less than retail so the seller took his chances.

On one occasion I bid on a item I was selling myself because to let it go for the cheap amount would have been more costly than me paying the fee for selling it - but it still cost and it was a lesson learnt that I never repeated.

On a £3400 sale the seller would have stumped up £250 in fees whichever what he did it.

 

[john.margetts]

That's one way but eBay charge you a percentage of the value of the starting price. Without checking I wouldn't know what £5k starting price would be but I'd suggest it being quite high.

I'm pretty sure that eBay charges are based on the final price, not the starting price. At least, on my many sales, I have never noticed an element of the charge based on the starting price.

Once upon a time, eBay charged a listing fee but that has been gone a very long time and charges are just on final price.