@brooke.munro wrote:
@crikey*mate wrote:
at the bottom of the post which you are referring to, there is a reply button, if you use the reply button on the exact post you are replying on, when you hit reply and the reply box comes up, there is a blue button up the top called "quote" press that, and the post will appear in your response, and then you can post underneath, and everyone knows which post your response relates to.
Haha thanks, I saw that before but thought that by clicking on the "quick reply" the messgae would only be sent to that particular person. I do realise this is easier to see which discussion is being held by whom though.
LOL - I only learned about quick reply the other day (this software is quite new, we've only had Lithium for a few months) and I couldn't really see the point, I'll have to experiment more, I'm thinking it must load less features like the smileys (not a bad thing - gawd they're awful) and stuff up the top for people conscious of their downloads etc, but not too sure... took me ages to work out where the cursur in it was
*looks embarrassed*
Are there Phantom buyers on Ebay???
Noooooooo....
I once bid on an auction and took a look at the bidding history, where I discovered a member who had been on eBay less than 30 days (you can't see member IDs in bidding history, but you can see FB number and click on to see a few details about what that member has bid on in the last 30 days - newly registered members have an icon next to their ID which disappears after 30 days).
Anyway, the reason why I became interested in that member's bidding history was because they already had FB in the hundreds, which I thought a little strange. Turns out that they had bid on nearly 30,000 items since joining. 
I didn't actually look at the date of their first bid, but that would have been a full-time job even if they'd been a member for 29 days. They were bidding on cheap craft items from a few different sellers, however there are a lot of sellers in China with a dozen IDs & stores which represent (and ship for) one parent company, so at the time I did wonder if this person was employed to effecively set a reserve price as a lot of the sellers started their items at 1c free post.
Not employed by eBay, mind you, but the parent company of the sellers in question, so shill bidding essentially.
@digital*ghost wrote:Are there Phantom buyers on Ebay???
Noooooooo....
I once bid on an auction and took a look at the bidding history, where I discovered a member who had been on eBay less than 30 days (you can't see member IDs in bidding history, but you can see FB number and click on to see a few details about what that member has bid on in the last 30 days - newly registered members have an icon next to their ID which disappears after 30 days).
Anyway, the reason why I became interested in that member's bidding history was because they already had FB in the hundreds, which I thought a little strange. Turns out that they had bid on nearly 30,000 items since joining.
Not employed by eBay, mind you, but the parent company of the sellers in question, so shill bidding essentially.
At a guess I would say they are part of the infamous Chinese Jewelry sellers/scammers,(they do that all the time
and at last count there where over 150 of them "buying" and "selling" to each other and the occasional genuine
buyer),
Reporting them is pointless as one will be NARU'd and two more take their place,
@go-tazz wrote:At a guess I would say they are part of the infamous Chinese Jewelry sellers/scammers,(they do that all the time
and at last count there where over 150 of them "buying" and "selling" to each other and the occasional genuine
buyer),
Reporting them is pointless as one will be NARU'd and two more take their place,
Not this time - at least, I don't think so, anyway, as the sellers I believe who were the ones primarily involved are mostly long-established on-site. I can't name them for obvious reasons, but they do have several stores - 2-3 on each eBay site, ranging from a few thousand feedback for the newer ones, to nearly 200k for the older ones. They all sell (mostly) the same fashion jewellery and findings at slightly different price points, plus the odd accessory, tools, sometimes fashion. They also have a variety of independent websites under the same famiy but catering for different needs (retail / wholesale).
They're generally not the type of sellers to mislead or deceive about jewellery, perhaps surprisingly - they don't even use that sterling silver plated trick like a lot do (as far as I can tell, anyway - most of their older stores have 20-30 thousand items listed and I haven't looked at them all 
). It was quite a while ago that I saw that buyer ID, and while the sellers still list 1c auctions, these days they've mostly switched to auctions with a start price higher than their BIN price, and I rarely bother with the auctions now either way.
It just struck me as very odd bidding behaviour, especially for a new ID, but for all I know there could have been a perfectly legit reason for it - although most of the reasons I came up with (even the non-legit ones) seemed a tad unlikely, if not plain silly. 
