price gouging!!

[russells350]

Why is Ebay allowing a person to have a bid go as high as $2415.00 US for 4 cans of Lysol Disinfectant Spray that normally sell for about $25.00??? Is this not PRICE GOUGING???? When will they remove this ad??????????????

[reallynicestamps]

No.

The seller put the spray up for auction at $31.00 at 7 am on the 28th.

Bidder 4***a bid $45 - not unreasonable if panicky at 7:20am

There were a couple of higher bidders who were outbid by a new account s****2 whose high bid was $150.

Then 3***4  another newbie bid $1,100 at 7:41am which was exposed by 1***8 another newbie bidding $1,400 at 7:48

And so on. All new, probably throwaway accounts.

I think we can assume that all the bidding after that was a bunch of jokers.

One of whom will be getting a Strike if he doesn't pay on winning.

While the seller would have been better off using Fixed Price/Immediate Payment, it looks as if he is the victim here, not the criminal.

[shplad]

No Worries. EBay is doing precious little about this.

They said they were going to put a stop to all price gouging for essentials and/or pandemic-related items. There are still plenty of them there.

On top of that, my friends and I have been trying to use the "Report pricing gouging" feature on the website for over a week. Throughout that time, it never worked once.

What a joke.

[mrdutch1001]

eBay cannot just push a button and take these listings down all in one go.

It is an overwhelming time-consuming challenge and some of these brazen sellers re-list as fast as listings are taken down and/or re-list under new &/or different accounts.

[mrdutch1001]

This may help to better explain how eBay is working to rid the marketplace of price-gougers and their listings:

https://www.ebayinc.com/stories/news/we-are-actively-removing-price-gouging-prohibited-items-from-eb...

[theoldestfart]

I gave up reporting price gouging sellers selling cleaners for $60 for a $5 bottle and praying on people who are frightened. This was infuriating since the eBay Price Gouging reporting page never was tested and is unusable for over a week. Quite frankly I feel eBay should add disinfectants/cleaners to the prohibited list since I have seen auctions underway where even the starting price was horrendously over priced.

[mrdutch1001]

I agree the Report button did not work for me, either, so I never bothered after the first few attempts.

However, I'm confident that many many of those items that were being bid up into the hundreds, thousands of dollars were being done by fool-hardy gamers and attention-seekers who were looking to see how high they could get items bid up to, thus drawing attention to these items ... and never had any intention of ever paying for the items. I also suspect many of the price-gouging items were cancelled by sellers because of non-payment and/or eBay cancelling them and then continually re-listing to try it all over again. Some people just have a horrible sense of responsibility and compassion and/or no responsibility or sense at all, and certainly no consideration for fellow humans.

[lotzofuniquegoodies]

@theoldestfart 

Except there are listing being pulled as price gouging when they are not. See attached discussion. Curious how often this is happening to legitimate listings and actual price gouging listings are being bypassed.

https://community.ebay.com/t5/Selling/eBay-removed-my-video-game-listing-for-price-gouging/m-p/30811...

Appears the bots have run amok!!!

-Lotz

[theoldestfart]

Yup typical eBay. They simply repeat the PR spin when you contact them. They told me one item I reported was removed. It was not removed. The seller sold out of the disinfectant and according to my calculations made over $5500 profit on the item alone let alone the exorbitant shipping charges.

They need to sharpen their aim during this crisis for those items which scared / vulnerable people are buying.  Personally I have soured on buying on eBay. The last 3 items I purchased had to be returned. Lost time waiting for delivery, shipping items back and looking for a replacement.   I gave up and bought the item locally at higher price but it worked.

[mrdutch1001]

keep in mind though, just because items show as sold, doesn't mean they were paid for, no way to know that...

[cumos55]

Bidders can cancel their bids towards the end of the auction.

They can cancel to the point there would be no bids on the listed item...  or just one bid left.

[mrdutch1001]

I suspect these items that look like they have sold for thousands of dollars are part of bidding games. There are plenty of morons; pathetic attention seeking souls using these products as a gaming board to see how high they can bid up the item before the auction ends, no payment involved and possibly not even in possession of the product.

[richardcm]

---

@mrdutch1001 wrote:

I suspect these items that look like they have sold for thousands of dollars are part of bidding games. There are plenty of morons; pathetic attention seeking souls using these products as a gaming board to see how high they can bid up the item before the auction ends, no payment involved and possibly not even in possession of the product.

---

I think that some new ids are being made by vigilantes eBay members driving up the price to punish the sellers trying to price gouge. No intention of paying.

[theoldestfart]

The problem is that buyers going to eBay and finding these outrageous prices of the item whether via starting price set by the seller or by these vigilante bidders give the impression that eBay is lost control of the marketplace.

Their price gouging reporting page is still useless/broken. I reported an item for gouging last week and the item is still up on eBay. As I mentioned previously in this thread my past couple of experiences with buying items on eBay resulted in frustration and lost time waiting for items to show up only to have to return them.  

It is not just me that has this experience on the service. People in the repair business of certain laptops avoid buying parts due to being scammed so much.

Sorry but I feel that I am tilting at windmills here and this crisis has only magnified this issue.  

[femmefan1946]

Part of the problem is that eBay has never acted on single reports from single members.

For good reason.

A single report may be from a competitor, a vigilante, or be just plain wrong.

Multiple members reporting the same item seem more likely to be checked out.

And some of those will still remain-- because there actually is no problem with the listing.

In this particular case, and many others like it, I agree that the goofballs are the reason what may have been an honest auction was destroyed .

We can't know the seller's motives.

But it is very unlikely that he will ever see even a reasonable return, which might be a lesson.

Though what that lesson might be is moot.

[marnotom!]

While price gouging is certainly a concern on eBay, particularly in these challenging times, I think discussing it on this thread is just going to confuse the OP who may not still understand at this point that the high price they’re seeing for the item is not the seller’s work but that of “bidders”.

I’m wondering what the OP feels will be accomplished by eBay taking down this listing. Surely leaving it up would serve as a cautionary message for sellers considering auctions as opposed to BINs?

Well, at least sellers with a modicum of sense, I suppose 🙄

[jildeve_0]

I just tried to report a seller for price gouging and there isn't even an option for it anymore. Trying to sell a 4 pack of 500ml (2L total) of PSP isopropyl alcohol for $72, which costs $10.99 at the Costco for the exact same item. It's disgusting. Get your **bleep** together, EBAY.

[marnotom!]

I can find the “report” button near the bottom of the listing page when viewing listings on my mobile.

Did you try using your browser’s “find in page” function?

[reallynicestamps]

The 'price goughing' interdiction was in place early on in the pandemic, when stores were selling out of toilet paper for no reason, and of hand sanitizer and other cleaning products, for good reason.

EBay stopped all sales  for about a week, then allowed some sellers (who they had ratified by some mysterious process) to sell for a couple of months.

Then things settled down and now pretty well anyone can sell pretty well anything.

Now, here's the thing.

Many, if not most of those 'gouging' auctions were bid up and up by vigilantes and goofs. It is really very doubtful that any of those $1000 bottles of sanitizer were ever paid for.

And in the cases where the seller really was asking a Fixed Price of $1000 for a bottle of sanitizer, do you really thing any one would pay that much? (Okay Gwenyth Paltrow, but you'd have to relabel it as being made from the milk of unborn lambs, gluten-free and vegan.)

This is one case where the market will take care of the problem.

Put the questionable item on your Watch List and see if it actually sells.

Which it won't.