Ebay phantoms ???

[Joe D'Attilio]

WHy is it that when ever I check out a tool listing...they have some sort of proxy/phantom bidders on every one?

the User name always looks like this letter *** letter - (i.e d***m, w***d) and there are a bunch of these "bidders"

[Stuart Johnson]

I don't think they show the actual bidders name / id anymore.

[JohnT Fitzgerald]

They started to do that to 'hide' the identities of all the bidders - I saw that documented on eBay somewhere.

[Joe D'Attilio]

that makes sense..thanks

[David G Baker]

If I had a bad experience with an Ebayer I would E-mail other folks and warn them about people that were bidding on items they were trying to sell and warn buyers about bad seller experiences. Those days are long gone, now you have to depend on feedback and Ebay is making it difficult to use the feedback system to detect bad Ebayers.

[Mike Henderson]

If I had a bad experience with an Ebayer I would E-mail other folks and warn them about people that were bidding on items they were trying to sell and warn buyers about bad seller experiences. Those days are long gone, now you have to depend on feedback and Ebay is making it difficult to use the feedback system to detect bad Ebayers.

In May, eBay will prevent sellers from leaving negative feedback for buyers, as long as the buyer has paid (after all, that's the primary obligation of the buyer). This will allow buyers to leave feedback without having to worry about getting a retaliatory negative feedback and should improve the reliability of feedback of sellers.

I certainly look forward to that change.

Mike

[Ben Cadotte]

WHy is it that when ever I check out a tool listing...they have some sort of proxy/phantom bidders on every one?

the User name always looks like this letter *** letter - (i.e d***m, w***d) and there are a bunch of these "bidders"

Supposidly it is to protect buyers from unwanted offers of a lower price by email on big ticket items. I forget at what price the hide kicks in. Also the seller can manualy select to have the auction private.