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@sjchaps wrote:
I also find the suggestion all of these sellers are only doing this to cover low stock levels questionable as is the suggestion if you buy it with ridiculous delivery costs the seller will not go through with the sale at that total price. If they do you have no recourse.
But that doesn't make any logical sense.
Why would a seller deliberately try to deter sales by making their pricing utterly ridiculous, only to turn around and just go
if someone did wind up paying around $500 for a $10 item?
If a seller could just go and buy the item for $1 and ship that instead, there'd be no incentive to deter purchase - a seller who is trying to prevent purchase knows they can't follow through with an order, and if they can't follow through with an order, the buyer can get their money back one way or another, and the seller will get a defect for the privelege of it (sellers who don't meet eBay's standards can have their eBay fees increase significantly, that is if they don't get booted permanently from the site - a quick, temporary couple hundred bucks at the risk of paying a lot more in the long term, or even losing their business entirely on here, doesn't sound like a most likely scenario to me).
There are sellers on here that make no adjustments to their pricing at all when they run out of stock, they just keep selling items at regular price - items that they know they can't supply. They don't bother telling the unsuspecting buyer, they just mark it as shipped and play the "must have been lost in the post" card if a buyer queries it (there are some who don't when it's a low-priced item).
eBay didn't always have the out of stock feature, and this practice began as a way for listings not to end when a seller was out of stock and be able to maintain all of the sales history for their items. In a lot of cases, I suspect it's a matter of old habits die hard.
You can always check the revision history of an item to see if / when the seller went in and changed the price and / or postage on an item. You can also check to see if anyone has bought an item since those adjustments were made (seen plenty of listings that sold daily when they were something like $25, ending abruptly when they went up to say $200).
There's been plenty of people over the years who have been caught out by sellers who don't make any effort to deter sales, causing buyers to wait weeks for items that will never arrive. In all my time I've never seen one "I accidentally paid $400 for postage on a really small item and now the seller says 'too bad'." post, here or elsewhere.
