My willingness to spend real money is correlated to the transparency of the seller.
In the case of the upcoming PWCC auction, the seller’s identities are shielded.
I find that very discouraging, and I will have a very difficult time pulling the trigger on high level auctions.
This feels short-sighted.
I do not know their position. I can imagine that it was challenging dealing with consumers pointing out the (0) bidders. I can also imagine that some of the (0) bidders are real, and that PWCC wanted to limit their exposure to these complaints… that’s just my intuition.
But, I personally want to know that the folks I’m bidding against include (but not limited to) proven bidders.
Just curious as to why you feel so strongly about this but at least from my understanding, all of the Heritage Auctions are the same in the sense that you can’t see who else is bidding but no one seems to complain about them.
If this is about bidding against a shiller, I guess that makes sense to an extent except that with a place like PWCC the bid sharks might be attacking low feedback people who might be genuine. Especially after most of the items we were all blown away with price wise in the last block that ended up being paid for so maybe nowadays we might be oversensitive to potential shills.
-Edit- I now see the part about proven bidders. Does Heritage do something to make sure everyone bidding is “proven”?
Your post admits that you couldn’t know either way so this doesn’t make sense. eBay offers the feature for a reason and PWCC chose to use it. Maybe it’ll blow up on them and they’ll change back. Send them a message and maybe if a bunch of others do they will.
Bid what you’d pay for the card. If you win you win if you don’t you don’t. Some you’ll win for your absolute max bid and some you’ll likely win for less. I guarantee part of the issue they dealt with was winners looking at the bid history of items they won and wanting discounts because the second or third bidders were low feedback or 100% bid activity or had retractions. I sell a couple hundred auctions a year and I see this myself. I’ve not wasted too much time doing detective work on it but I’ve seen multiple occasions where accounts they claimed were shills were past paying customers of mine.
PWCC seems to be ramping up shill bidding. I have received several emails like this.
Dear eBay Community Member,
The following item, on which you placed a bid (xxxxxxxxxxxxx) has had a bid retraction or cancellation, and you are now the high bidder. Congratulations! You can view the retraction/cancellation and the reason provided by selecting the (bid history) link from the individual item page. As a result of this retraction/cancellation, there is a possibility that the high bid amount and the current high bidder have changed. You can always view the current status of any item by going to the individual item page. (Be sure to refresh or reload the page to view the most up-to-date information.)