You’re right imo. The business motive is clear. The thing is, PWCC could be at fault and they’d still have a case against eBay. Obviously I’m not a corporate lawyer and there are many blurred lines.
A lot of people are kicking PWCC when they’re down. Ken Goldin’s smirks rubbed me the wrong way. I’m all for fierce competition, but not when the hobby is put at risk (market liquidity, price transparency, reduced customer experience, access to the broader market). It seemed like a few tangetial players were aware which makes it more like a dirty business tactic rather than the best interest of the consumer.
There have been rumors and more of Probstein shilling for a decade. Funny how eBay didn’t kick them off the platform. It’s like they don’t have their own marketplace coming out or something
Rumors unfortunately aren’t always fact or all the girls be thinkin I’m rockin’ that BBC
Secondly, unless PWCC had a private contract with eBay which is possible but unlikely there is no legal case. No one has a right to use eBay is a private marketplace and they can disallow use and participation for any individual or entity. The timing for the ban may have been in poor taste (not illegal) but the ban for shill bidding is completely valid(not necessarily true) if the owner of the private marketplace deems that to be the case. eBay doesn’t need to ‘prove’ anything nor will they ever share the information and finding related to the decision but all it takes is one phony bid since Dec 13 1998…
when is the pay-per-view for getting some inside digs on pokemon? i guess information is never free.
Now back to the OP topic. yeah, if PWCC doesn’t sue, they know they are guilty. i don’t think eBay is that dumb, so i’ll bet they definitely have good evidence. but it seems eBay has been preparing too. they have this new “revolutionary trading card experience”. have you all seen it? this looks like a PSA registry plus ebay price metrics to give you “valuation” of your collection. eBay is pulling prices from their own “rich transaction history, track the card’s velocity and normalize the time window to give you the most accurate, trustworthy, and actionable single data point.” let’s see how useful this is…
goldin auction…i remember zandgemporium did a video on the get-rich-quick video series goldin was offering on pokemon cards. that pretty much summarizes goldin auction for me and their core values. i don’t care if people are in it for the money, but when they act like a joker, with almost no integrity, then that really irks me. i could not see goldin wanting to work “under” eBay. for now, eBay is on its own. the only real consolidation is MERGERS, when a power structure is clearly defined. partnerships are extremely difficult when both parties are vying for almost the same thing.
wonder if eBay forced that mandatory arbitration clause on PWCC when they contracted up on the partnership.
i don’t really care about a lawsuit as an outsider. a lawsuit, regardless of the outcome, does not change the end game. in either scenario, PWCC would probably NOT go back to eBay, and eBay will not welcome PWCC back. like Rudy said, a lawsuit in this case, could be upwards of $100m if settled in PWCC’s favor if eBay was dumb enough to place the blame before having any rock solid evidence. otherwise, it’s just a money suck for both sides - only with the law firms retained earning millions for their litigation services.
let’s just move on and see what each brand will offer the market.
I never thought I’d say this, but lately, I’ve been wanting to learn more about law. More and more, I see the need to be more educated on laws and legal knowledge…
@gemmintpokemon, Hit it on the head! There have been multiple members on this site alone we had to remove for bonified shill bidding. They did not receive the same treatment from ebay as pwcc. All of them are still actively selling on ebay.
As for legal perspective, no on can possibly provide that without knowing all the internal information. No one knows what the purposely vague email entails. That is by design. There is clearly more to this situation than simply “PWCC shill bid”.
eBay has allowed a symbiotic relationship with many websites that have used their sales data for providing market sale info in exchange for advertising and driving traffic to their platform. Gamevaluenow, Pricecharting, Mavin, PSA, etc. Now it seems they are almost fully prepared to launch their own sales data market app. They have worked very hard lately to try and keep the data to themselves when they can—such as best offer acceptance prices and verified sales. If they can figure out a way to force people to go through them for sales data, they will. In time PWCC will be able to have their own valuable sales data research if they are successful with their platform. Trying to kill off would be competitors to try and retain their stranglehold on this data seems to me like a longer term business plan priority for eBay. I think they realized late they could improve their influence and bottom line if they just use their own data to do what everyone else has been doing with it for years.
It was irresponsible and dumb of Rudy (and everyone else parroting it) to say that if PWCC doesn’t publicly sue then they admit guilt because that isn’t true whatsoever. They shouldn’t and won’t sue because I don’t know if people in here know or not but the way our legal system works has as much (or sometimes more?) to do with your bankroll than it does your guilt/innocence. I wonder which is bigger between eBay and PWCC…
The claims were so vague and eBays terms written so in their favor that they wouldn’t lose anything anyways. Not for defamation, not for lost business or anything, becuase I’m sure they didn’t violate their T&C with the suspension. If 1 consignor ever shilled their own item on PWCC (hint: some did) then their statement was true.
Without a doubt there was shill bidding lol I can guarantee there’s at least one person in this thread alone that asked a buddy to put a bid in on their item or they themselves bid on an item they already had in their collection with no intention of buying (as pokenomics calls it, defensive bidding).
I personally had a pack I was selling on pwcc a couple of months ago get shill bid blatantly to $5000 by two bidders when it was worth $600 max. I asked pwcc to remove the bids and they did but the shills came back with a few minutes left. It went unpaid obviously. The point is this has been happening for decades from consignors so of course eBay is not lying when they wrote what they wrote.
The question is whether pwcc as a company was doing it or encouraging it and why eBay decided to single out one individual company. The former is unclear but I hope it’s not true, while the latter seems pretty obvious given that PWCCs marketplace will be launching in 10 days.
As @gottaketchumall and @smpratte point out, eBay’s statement was very carefully worded. “Individuals associated with PWCC” can mean anything from PWCC’s founder to individual consignors. eBay intentionally didn’t specify. Does PWCC have a legal case against eBay for this? I’m not a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure the first step in a defamation case is to prove the statement is false. As others have pointed out, one consignor shilling their item makes that statement “true.” Hell if PWCC’s janitors bid on items that statement is true. I wouldn’t want to get in a protracted legal battle over it even if it was totally made up because of those technicalities.
I think the best route would be for PWCC to commission an independent investigation. It would cost a lot less than a legal battle and give people confidence for the future as to whether there was any shill bidding ordered by PWCC management or done by PWCC employees.
We’re all just speculating and I appreciate the good points that have been risen. Given the timing of all this, I think it’s obvious eBay has ulterior motives whether shilling happened or not. At the same time, PWCC honestly has done itself no favor by switching to private bids not too long ago, and their recent public response has amounted to “to the best of our knowledge we didn’t shill bid…and here’s our new platform!” (at least in my eyes that’s how I read it). To me that’s not very confidence-inspiring as a response, but we are all looking at this context with our own perceptions and biases I suppose. If they have the right buyer/seller protections I’ll keep using them, no skin off my back.
Overall I agree with Gary that there is likely a lot of fuckery on both sides right now. But again none of us can prove any of it. As independent parties I suppose we should just look forward to the potential coming sales
Ebay has done nothing about shill bids for decades but expects sellers to be able to police their own auctions?
Am I missing where the buyers are forced to buy a card? Is the buyer forced to buy if the price goes above market, specially far about market prices? I’m pretty sure it’s up to the eventual buyer to hit the bid now button. If they are willing to put a max bid of XXXX, how is any company to know (besides ebay) what his max bid is up to? Are they also not saying I am willing to spend that $XXXX amount? Sellers of every size have their own accounts to bid up their items. How many SD Pikachu’s and 25th McDonald’s Pikachus where shill bid this last year? Did anyone with a brain not realize that $10k was a shill bid?
In conclusion, shill bidding is bad 100%, but it can’t make you pay more for a card than you were willing to pay
Its pretty simple: Ebay did not like PWCC and we saw the ban hammer. Could be the tax or monetarily business implications, but it doesn’t matter since it’s Ebay’s choice to choose who they have on the platform. Unless the real hired pwcc shill bidders stands up, most of this discussion is hearsay.
