10, 20, 30, 40, 50 percent? At what point do you begin to suspect shill bidding, based on the bidders bid activity percentage with the seller?
When I was a buyer, I would look more to the feedback numbers on other bidders. For a higher priced collectible, any seller who allowed bidders with feedback of less than 10 or 20 was suspect. It has always been too easy to start a new account. But it takes a bit of effort to get feedback. I could then look at other metrics like bidder activity with seller, and compare that with sellerâs recent offerings.
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Sadly⌠eBay has no ways of blocking any feedback score to bid on your items. In their eyes 0 feedback == 100,000 feedback. Only thing you can do, as a seller, is to block people that had X unpaid item strikes in past 30 days. Which can be easily by-passed by shillers by just making a new account. eBay milks sellers left and right, and more and more âbuyersâ learn how to use the system and get free items due to buyer protection.
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Itâs a combination of things, high percentage like 20% imo, low feedback, multiple bids, like why would you want to keep rising the price
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seems like shill bidding to me, yea. maybe h***c really wants it and bid up to his max already. But the other guy kept raising and raising and has got a low feedback store. By the criteria named in this thread it probably is shill bidding, But no way to know for certain of course.
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Percentage only means something if the user has a lot of bids on different items.
65% activity on 30 items from a small seller is far more damnning than 100% on 2 items
The number of bids matters too. If I have bid 9 times on one item and 1 time on a different item then 90% of my activity is on one seller. But this is hardly evidence of shilling.
There is no clear-cut answer. Ebay obscures things and donât seem particularly interested in stopping shill bidding on their platform. With the tools provided you can never definitively know if an item is shilled or not. Personally I just dont bother trying to find out. If you bid/snipe in the last seconds and youâre only bidding a price you would be happy to pay you will not have any problems
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Looks like eBays auto bit system to me
there are so many ways to shill bid. some obvious, some not so obvious. there is no way to tell 100%. sometimes, i do a little bidding war with people when i get a very serious opponent and a desirable item and weâll have some back and forth, and that might come off as shilling.
Shows how long it has been since I sold on ebay. For any substantial item I used to block any bidders with feedback of less than 20. Its just made the world an easier place. Less chance of unrealistic expectations, non-payment, or an outright scam.
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I get it. Thing is, this bad data becomes âmarket valueâ next time someone asks how much X is worth, or complains something seems over priced.
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If you think an item is being manipulated in this way then donât pay the artificial market price. The market always corrects itself.
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whenever I lose
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I buy tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars of eBay items a year. Many are BIN OBO. There are several times throughout the year where I will be a 100% bid activity buyer with a certain seller as I infrequently participate in auctions. Last time it came up to check I threw a quick bid on a PWCC item and confirmed that my 30 day history was 100% with that seller. Especially with a seller like PWCC there are some bidders who only buy through them or similar sellers.
This forum is way too quick to cry shill based on that alone. Or even a low feedback buyer. I similarly sell $100k+ in items per year and sell to plenty of sub 5 feedback buyers. Itâs tough to know what is real and what isnât especially given the recent prices moves. The only real solution would be for eBay to take more action against non payers but donât hold your breath.
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Agree, you canât look at bid activity % alone, I donât buy much on eBay these days so Iâm almost always a 100% activity bidder on auctions because my purchasing is so infrequent.
You have to look at all the variables and even then it can be hard to tell sometimes, though you do get those instances when you have those accounts with 10+ retractions in a month which is suss AF.
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Going along w what everyone else said and id also like to add the fact that there can easily be shill bidding from high feedback accounts as well. Say, for example, two people w high feedback accounts collude and drive up the price for an item so they can sell copies they already own for more. Sometimes you just have to use your best judgement because there is no clear answer.
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Exactly this and why I pointed out a few shills on the recent pwcc. 3 feedback in 12 months, but 24 retractions. Please.
Looks legit
In the past year, the 10- feedback buyers were the ones causing the least problems for me. Leaving feedback, doing proper spelling and grammar in messages. Something buyers with 1000+ feedback can learn something from. Iâve had to deal with more unpaid cases by âlong timeâ eBay buyers and I just strike them every time, and I always get message âoh sorry, yeah my paycheck blablablablablabla I pay in 2 daysâ. And itâs not my problem when eBays auto system steps in and opens unpaid case against them.
People call shill very easily because they have no clue how eBays auto-bid system works. They look at the bidding history, see one user bit 10 times in a row and think itâs a shill.
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The eternal optimist might say, shilling is good for the market because it keeps prices upâ:eyes:
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