[Leica] Re: typical E-bay bad deal

[Javier Perez <japho@cunyvm.cuny.edu>]

Hi
First of all let me pre-empt any critcisms about being off topic
by saying that Leica owners as well as owners of just about anything
interesting enough to be worth hanging on to are the prime targets of
E-bay
Therefore this is dead on topic as it affects all of us.

Secondly, let me say that I don't really consider myself to be a leica
collector
but rather a selfless sort who has devoted his adult life to
protrtecting these
poor creatures (preferrably mint) from the hands of greedy
sopeculators.....
Yeah that's me.

Here goes

The only thing E-bay does is, inflate markets. Proof of which is that on

several occasion I have been quoted E-bay prices afer placing WTB ads on
news groups
These are of course way off-base prices.

In a real auction the auctioneer receives a percentage of the money the
item sold for
You can kick up the price by having someone else bid on your item but
it'll cost ya
every time.

With E-bay on the other hand you can place an item, put in the high bid
under
another e-mail or a friend's e-mail and falsely jack up the selling
price. Then, a few weeks later
you place the item for auction under yet another e-mail name and repeat
the process
until some sucker bites. Because the auctioneer never knows if the
transaction
took place and because there is no auctioneer's fee there is no limit to
how much you
can inflate the value of an item Thus: price fixing

In a real auction the bidders bid rationally, the idea being that you
are supposed to save money
rather than spend more. At E-bay, the I must have it type outnumber
serious collectors or investors.
The last 5 minutes turn into a feeding frenzy. and the price skyrockets.
This occurs even in an honest
e-bay auction.

But what really bugs me about E-bay is the idea of helping someone else
make money without having
anything to show for it. The only time I paticipated in an auction I was
outbid but I ended up helping
some jerk add 50 bucks to the price of his tuner. The only reason I bid
on it was because I had bought
stuff from him before. After that I never bought anything from him
again.

Usually I get responses from the few defenders of e-bay (sellers of
course) that revolve around free
market arguments. I'm not calling for anything to outlawed or regulated
to death. But I would like to see
consumers to smarten up and recognize a scam when they see it. Then the
racket will

Lastly lets remember that the traditional auction was devised long
before IT came around and the ratio of
seller to bidders was maybe 1/a few hundred and governed largely by
proximity to the auction house. Thus
the prospect of getting a competitive price on an item was very good.
Today at E-bay that item could well
be in the 1/million on a hot item. What does that say for competitive
pricing.

My apologies to the honest sellers who take part in E-bay. You are
unwittingly taking part in a scam in that
you help inflate markets disprportionately..

I posted several articles in rec.audio.* a while back and started a
rukus for a few days. I you want to see it
goto www.dejanews and search for my e-mail address and auction and scam
in the old archive. Lets start
spreading the anti-auction gospel, lest we crucify opur wallets.

Seriously, do you want to see the 4000 dollar chrome M4 in a couple of
years????



See Ya
Javier





Andrew Nemeth wrote:

> >Hmm....
> >Reserve of over 1500 bucks!
> >Sounds like the typical E-bay bad deal
> >bout to get worse.
> >How I hate E-bay
>
> How I agree!  No matter how much I read to the contrary,
> I can't help thinking that ebay is rigged.
>
> The bidding always mysteriously jumps 100% 5 minutes
> before close, so as to force interested parties to
> cough up 2x as much as they were prepared to in order
> to get the item they want.
>
> Man...  Ebay, Hotmail... net-rubbish!
>
> Regds,
>
> Andrew N.
> www.nemeng.com