delisting an item that already has bids???

[mistertoolman]

I am only an ebay buyer on rare occasions--never been a seller, so I am not so familiar with the rules.  I bid on an item; then the seller delisted it and immediately relisted it at a higher starting bid.  Doesn't quite seem fair to me after I already had a bid in.  Is this really considered OK and ethical?

[toby_le_pue · Accepted solution]

It is unethical.

If the seller has done this before then he will have to pay

final value fees on the highest bid before he cancelled the bids,

[nubian_treasures]

It is possible the bidding could have gone up even higher but the impatient seller didn't bother to wait around to see.

In a way, it was good the seller cancelled your bid. If you had won and the price wasn't as high as the seller preferred, they have refused to sell the item. There are a lot of sellers who do that especially when they list the item for a low price and don't get the bids they expected.

[femmefan1946]

It's worse than unethical.

It's stupid.

The seller sees only the high bid, not the maximum bid. If I list something at $10 and you bid $100, I will only see a $10 bid until someone comes along and bids ,say, $90 when my $100 bid shows up.

Most bids come in the last few moments of the listing. Oddly this is also true with Fixed Price /Good Til Cancelled listings which close after 30 days and immediately relist. But they sell on Day 30.

And then there are snipe bidders. They live on the edge, bidding in the last few seconds of the auction hoping to be the guy with the high bid, before being outbid a nano-second later.

And, (there is no end to 'ands') some of those snipers are using services which will bid for them automatically in that nano-second.

So now you are much more sophisticated that the dumb seller, who missed all the higher bids he was going to get and now will not only not sell his item, but won't get bids from those annoyed bidders. And paid eBay for the privilege of not selling.

Stupid.

This job goes south, there well may not be another. So here is us, on the raggedy edge.- Captain Malcolm Reynolds