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Shady selling practices on eBay (or elsewhere) that bother you


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Items that are "untested" but listed at full retail price.

 

This one's been bugging me lately. It's doubly worse on handhelds. You have an 'untested' original Gameboy? Really? It runs on AA batteries! Either you're lying to get more money for a broken unit, Or you're too lazy to swing by the dollar store for some cheap testings batteries. In which case, why should I believe you'll muster the energy to properly pack and ship my item on time?

 

I've been taking some advice I read somewhere & checking the seller's other auctions when the item's untested. If your 2600 lot is 'untested' but your Intellivison lot is 'works great!', something is very wrong.

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This one's been bugging me lately. It's doubly worse on handhelds. You have an 'untested' original Gameboy? Really? It runs on AA batteries! Either you're lying to get more money for a broken unit, Or you're too lazy to swing by the dollar store for some cheap testings batteries. In which case, why should I believe you'll muster the energy to properly pack and ship my item on time?

 

I've been taking some advice I read somewhere & checking the seller's other auctions when the item's untested. If your 2600 lot is 'untested' but your Intellivison lot is 'works great!', something is very wrong.

 

I agree overall, but how is it wrong exactly if one's intellivision and games are found to work great but not so much for the VCS/2600 lot.

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I agree overall, but how is it wrong exactly if one's intellivision and games are found to work great but not so much for the VCS/2600 lot.

 

Because the two hook up to a TV with the exact same connection- unless they don't have an AC adapter for the Atari, there's no reason for it to not be tested with the Inty's AV cable. It implies the seller is either very shady, or very stupid.

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This isn't game related, but this is something I saw the other day that irritated me.

 

Someone I know wants a toy of the VF-21/22 from Macross Plus/Macross 7. Their birthday is coming up, so I decided to look and see if I could find a good quality 1/60 scale Yamato release on ebay from a seller who didn't look shady as under an awning at midnight.

 

One auction caught my eye because it was about the price range of the item I was seeing, but just a little bit cheaper. It had a stock picture from the Yamato 1/60 box of a Macross 7 release. I checked the auction out. After a bit of reading, I realized they weren't selling the transforming toy.

 

No, they were selling a "custom made and painted wooden model".

 

There were no pictures of this "custom wooden model". There were only pictures of the packaging of the Yamato toy release and of the Yamato toy. There was no room to doubt that they were trying to mislead someone.

 

Scams like that really piss me off, because there's an extra layer of maliciousness there. I mean, they could have just pretended they were selling the toy and never shipped anything for their rip off scheme, but these people have gone that extra little mile to put their scam in small print to try and trick someone.

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Hi guys,

 

I have to say whats really problematic for me is the sellers bidding on their items or friends that do it for them to increase the prices for their auctions! I usually check the bid activity with the buyers and some are over 75% and upwards. Makes me wonder if the seller/buyer are connected. When the bid exceeds the maximum amount I have in mind, I move on to find another auction that I'm interested in.

 

Anthony...

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http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/contextual/condition_1.html

 

"New" and "New-Other" being used to describe refurbished hard disks. When you buy what you think is a new or new-other hard disk, you are very very likely buying a hard disk that has many hours of usage on it and which was taken from a used computer. Oftentimes the hard disk has errors remapped and all the user-readable SMART diagnostic data reset to 0.

 

To the seller it *is* new and comes from the factory. But the "factory" is a small operation in china that "refurbishes" disks. A guy sitting at a desk mapping out errors and resetting the diagnostic records to zero by using a PC-3000 or similar. The seller can claim innocence because of that! They just say, "my supplier said it was new!". They'll mostly refund you if you catch them on it. But +90% of the people don't, and it slides through. What a racket! They acquire these disks in bulk from non-secure recycling centers for like $5.00 a disk.

 

Have it be known you can't really "refurbish" hard disks. The wear points are heads, and servo & motor bearings. To replace them takes more effort and time and money than it does to purchase a new hard disk in the first place. Technically you can - typically in data recovery cases, but that's like $1,000 per disk.

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Inflated shipping prices. Nothing more annoying than seeing a wholesale lot of games up for sale with a $20-30 shipping quote.

 

I wouldn't find $20-$30 a bad price on a wholesale lot, depending on amount of games. A large flat rate cost you damn near $20 now alone. What I find annoying is someone selling 17 games and a shipping price of over $30 for STANDARD! That irritates the hell out of me.

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I wanted badly an Atari 2600 cartridge, Sorcerer's Apprentice, I looked carefully at pictures to check that the end side label was present (very common to fall out because of its small size) and when received, guess what? no end label!!!!

 

I leaved neutral calification just because maybe the customs messed with it and it fall. But I'm still disappointed.

 

Another idea is that the picture was old or the vendor had several of these and just took one without checking.

 

But I'm still disappointed.

 

Well, one more time, but I'm still disappointed :dunce:

 

Another thing come to my mind: I ordered a Matrix trilogy in Blu-ray, the three discs inside its fragile blue case where shipped out in a bag (A BAG!!!!) without any filling, so I received a case in pieces, and one of the discs always gave trouble reading it.

 

First and only time I tried to start an eBay return until I figured out that it would be more expensive :(

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Irks me when Ebay wont do anything about a seller who is so obviously shill bidding on his own crap.

 

I dealt with a guy I suspected of doing that repeatedly on an item he was selling over and over again. It was the same same picture, same item, same description and he never mentioned having more than one. It also came with the power supply, the same one always pictured in multiple auctions. I lost the auction five times in a row because I was not willing to go above a certain amount. On the sixth time I won. I think the guy finally gave up in disgust. Anyway after I won, I never saw him list another one, which reinforced the suspicions I had all along.

 

I cannot imagine paying for my own stuff just to give Ebay a cut each time it's "sold". I figure the guy lost money in an attempt to cash in or play me.

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