eBay has changed High bidder identification Practice

[Dragon Forge Design]

Ive noticed something changed on eBay concerning bids. It now looks that if a auction gets bids above $200.00, the bidders names now become anonymous and is now listed as Bidder1, Bidder 2 and so on..no more knowing who your competition is when bidding. The only person who knows who the bidders are appears to be the sellers.

eBay\'s explanation is this,

As the Internet evolves, eBay continues to strike a balance between preserving transparency and protecting our Community of members. eBay has decided to change how bid history information is displayed so bad guys cannot target bidders with fake offers using this information. In certain cases, some bidders will no longer be able to view Bidder User IDs on the Bid History page. Your User ID will be shown only to you and the seller of the item you\'re bidding on. Other members will see an anonymous name, such as Bidder 1, applied consistently to the Bid History page.

 

[Neil H]

Hi Jeff

Typical of ebay, although you can get a feel for the bidders history by drifting the mouse pointer over the history, you no longer have any chance to see if any of the bids are a scam or not!!!

Thanks for nothing ebay!!

All they are doing is protecting their market by not allowing you to identify & contact any bidder.


They care nothing if you are defrauded!

Neil

 

[Dragon Forge Design]

Yeah they try to make it sound like they are doing this to protect other bidders and sellers not hurt them but I can\'t figure out how this will help. Especially if theres a shill bidder in the mix helping pump up his buddies auctions.

To me it seams that eBay has abandoned the traditional auction on ebay infavor of the ebay store with its buy it now auctions. I think one of the worst things thats hurt the seller is the watch feature. i know that as a seller the amount I made on auctions dropped of significantly when the watching a auction got popular. Now Ill have many people watching the auction and very few bidding untill the last few seconds trying to snipe the auction away cheap.

 

[hakoMike]

If a number of non-winning bidders have been contacted by people claiming to be selling the same thing, then I can see the logic in this. High bidders are required for eBay to be successful, and if bidding a lot only means you are going to get assaulted with \"similar offer\" spam (some fraudulent and some not) then you are less likely to bid.