Little surprised at many of the above comments especially those who claim to be unaffected by shilling.
Let’s say someone siphons half the gas out of your car. Would you say it’s okay cause you still have half a tank.
Shilling is stealing. Shill bidders, and company’s that allow it are thieves:(
We’re all in the same pool as buyers/bidders. You can’t stop kids from peeing in the pool. We’ve already added as much chlorine as we can (reporting shills) and for intents and purposes the amount of pee is very minimal. But if you want to go to that really fun waterpark you’ve got to accept that there’s gonna be a little pee in the water.
Maybe it’s just you or maybe your generation, but making excuses for these thieves is surprising to me. “They’re just kids”? Personally, I don’t buy it.
Just like with every auction on eBay there’s a good chance of some shilling. Pwcc gets a few obvious ones every auction, unfortunately but they do often delete bids or the shills end up retracting on their own.
As others have said here, I don’t necessarily see what the problem is if you were willing to pay $500 (for example) for an item and you win it for $500 does it matter if someone with 0 feedback or someone with 1000 feedback placed the bids before you? It’s not like the old days where you could steal a deal often. The market is optimized and people know what stuff is worth and are often paying even more than that
I disagree with the logic. Sniping is still the most efficient option because nibblers and shillers will bring out your max bid. I snipe almost all my auctions and I either don’t win or if I do win I get the item below my max bid. Those new to eBay don’t quite understand the eBay auction format and turn it into a competition but still have the mindset they’ll get a super good deal.
If the market was optimized listings would have several snipes around the same amount of $$$, which does happen sometimes.
But back to the logic of the post. While you got the card for the max you were willing to pay, you could have potentially saved money by not sparking competition with an early bid.
PWCC is one of the only sellers that actively removes suspicious bids. Not only potential shill bids but string bids and other issues. They even did approved bids for higher end sports cards. Which is something you never see on ebay.
At this point I think most potential shilling is done by individuals who own the card. Even then I don’t think it makes up a majority or even a strong minority of their sales.
That BGS 9.5 Zard that sold for $72k last month was a really good look for PWCC. Some obvious shill bidding that brought the card to $100k early on, but they cleaned it up quickly and it still ended up being a successful auction with the buyer paying for the card.
The fact that with PWCC we will know if a card is paid for or not (because they confirm sales on their site and cards that aren’t paid for get it re-listed) makes it so that PWCC sales are some of the most reliable data we have.