I think that what you need to do, before you use ebay again, is go to the help pages and read through about what to do when things go wrong.
At the moment, when you have a problem-maybe an item not arriving on time-you are contacting the seller and they are fobbing you off, saying they will send a replacement or whatever.
I know ebay advises to contact seller first. Ignore that. It is a suggestion, not a rule or anything.
When something does not arrive on time, go straight to ebay and open a proper ebay claim for an item not received or not as described-whatever the problem is.
Follow it through properly. This means you will only settle for a full refund. Don't fall for offers of replacements as you only have a short window in which to settle this claim.
You can always buy another (preferably from someone else with a good record) once you get the refund.
In the recent case you mention, I took it that you won the auction and the seller cancelled. Presumably they refunded you?
So it is not a scam in the sense you were cheated of money, but it was certainly a false auction.
I wouldn't say it is normal for this to happen, but it is not rare either. It is always annoying to a buyer to have it happen because often they have waited a few days for an auction to end and they could have been looking elsewhere.
You can report the seller but it probably won't do much good.
It sounds to me as if the seller decided the auction didn't raise enough money, which is entirely their fault as they started it too low in that case, but some buyers don't read the help pages before they list either.
Check out the seller feedback before you bid in future, see if they are new to ebay & if the price is very low, just be aware this can happen. Ebay has these sorts of pitfalls for the unwary, you need to know what your options are when things go wrong.
