eBay-touted PowerSellers Exposed as Shills?

[PhilipCohen]

eBay-touted PowerSellers Exposed as Shills?
http://www.auctionbytes.com/forum/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=6502763
24 October 2009; last revised 31 October 2009

“Secrets of Success on eBay”
How two top sellers make hay with high-priced items

Featured in this linked article by Brad and Debra Schepp on the Auctiva website are two eBay Diamond/Titanium PowerSellers “BeckerTime,” a seller of pre-owned Rolex watches, and “QuickShipElectronics”, a seller of electronic goods.

Both are most successful eBay sellers, apparently. Making buckets of money, apparently. Loving all the recent changes made by eBay, apparently. Generally singing eBay’s praises. And being put forward by eBay as being major success stories of selling on eBay—even in these troubled economic times.

Well, have a look at the bidding activity stats on the completed auctions for “beckertime,” at link thereto.

In the oceans of “blood” there are a few islets of green. The 99c-start auctions are wildly successful; funny, the other forms of sale, “Buy It Now” and “Best Offer” and the high-start auctions, don’t seem to be doing anywhere near so well. I wonder why?

Regardless, don’t you wish that you too could get such consistent, enthusiastic, bidding activity on all your auctions?

Well, for the reason that these auction sales appear to be doing so well, have a look at the analysis of the bidding activity on a selection of this seller’s completed auctions in the spreadsheet at link thereto.

Never before have I seen so large a group of common (particularly low-feedback) bidders making so many bids on so many “pre loved” Rolex watches. I had no idea that there were so many “divorced” Rolex watches out there looking for new, well-heeled, partners; could it possibly be but the same few watches rolling over and over and over on many of these supposedly successful transactions: “Buyer did not pay”, “Buyer did not pay”; “Buyer did not pay”; who knows?

And even those few “Best Offer” transactions that appear to have sold, can we be any more sure that these are scrupulous transactions than are so many of the wildly successful auction sales that have so many common habitual underbidders thereon? Unfortunately, eBay has deliberately structured these non-auction selling formats so that there is no transparency regarding the purchaser on such “successful” transactions. Methinks that there may be few FVFs for eBay in this lot.

The “rolling” introduction of many of the common bidders that some may think could be indicative of shill bidding on this seller’s auctions (and on many others’ auctions listed in the spreadsheet) suggests that some sellers may have attended the same “How to Shill Bid” seminar or, possibly, that some “third party” is providing a shill bidding service for such unscrupulous vendors.

Regrettably, but maybe not surprisingly, a 30-auction analysis of the other seller, “quickshipelectronics”, demonstrates patterns of bidding that would also appear to indicate the possibility of habitual shill bidding.

I think there may be a lesson here: unscrupulous sellers should endeavour to keep as low a profile as possible lest they one day be caught with their pants/panties down. Shill bidding is rampant on eBay auctions and that is undoubtedly the real reason why many sellers use a separate “posting” ID when chatting on the eBay forums—particularly on the UK Motors forum.

One would also think that eBay would vet such sellers closely before inviting them into a public eBay-promoting PR program. Then, maybe they did vet them; otherwise, it would suggest that eBay really does not have any idea of how so very many “professional” sellers are behaving so unscrupulously on their auction platform—and I would have to very much doubt eBay’s lack of such knowledge. Then, I suppose that it’s always possible that they could not find a Diamond PowerSeller that was not shill bidding. Regardless, it says much about the “proactive, sophisticated” tools that eBay claims to have for the detection and control of such shill bidding.

The real question then is, are the people running eBay really so naïve and/or stupid or are they simply pathologically disingenuous and unscrupulous, like the many unscrupulous professional sellers whose criminal activities they knowingly facilitate on eBay auctions?

And, bear in mind that with the form of absolutely anonymous bidder masking originally introduced by eBay (Bidder x)—which is still suffered by users on the UK site—it is not possible to do any such analysis of bidding across multiple auctions as the aliases change every auction. Now, I wonder why that was initially eBay’s preferred form of masking?

They don’t call “Noise” Donahoe “Ho, Ho, Ho” for nothing; obviously, he thinks all we consumers are totally gullible but, ultimately, the joke will be on eBay and its stockholders.

The more detailed comment, “Shill Bidding on eBay: Case Study #2”, at
http://www.auctionbytes.com/forum/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=24296
_________________
Clearly, the lunatics at eBay have taken over the asylum and are bent on burning it down.
“The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.” ~ Albert Einstein.

[Tradguy]

How does any of this "prove" shill bidding?

Philip - please look up the term "begging the question".

Before you tear into me, calling me names, berating your detractors, and colorful accusations does not make a logical argument, please consider what I am going to tell you.

Statistical analysis that assumes to prove a hypothesis does not, on it's face, prove anything. They are just numbers. The inferences you are applying to the numbers don't prove anything at all. They are merely inferences and not proof of your hypothesis.

Where is your control group? What if this is simply an analysis of normal bidding activity? Without some kind of baseline, these numbers are meaningless and prove nothing at all.

It would be as if you were trying to show us that the temperature in your city in Austrialia was unusually hot this year, and only showed us detailed statistics about your city this year.

Throwing in lots of "how naive can the government of Australia be to not see the scorching heat" types of statements, while colorful, doesn't prove a thing.

I am actually interested in knowing if there are regular shill bidders on ebay. I've been a seller there for a very long time, long before they made bidders anonymous. As a seller, I've gotten to see bidding patterns and buyer behavior on many different types of items across many price ranges.

When you are selling a popular items yourself, and you know that you are not shill bidding, you are staring at true baseline data. This would be an actual control group.

For your analysis to work, you would need to show that there is a strong divergence in buyer behavior between the control group and the alleged shilling group.

For example, let's say you had 10 diamond powersllers in the jewelry category. Five of f them you know for a fact are NOT shill bidding, and the other 5 are suspect. You compare the bidding behavior over time between the two groups.

If there is no difference in the behaviors, it would mean that..

1 - The statistical analysis can not accurately detect shilling activity and we do not know from the data if the "shilling" group was shilling because it lookis statistically the same as the control group.

or

2 - The data looked the same because no shilling activity was actually taking place. In other words, these stats are showing normal bidding behaviors.


But if the analysis showed statistically significant different behaviors, then it would mean that one possible explanation could be shill bidding. But how could we know for sure?

I think to ultimately "prove" the case using the kind of data you are accumulating, you would need to find yet another control group. This would be a group of known sellers that are definitely shill bidding by their own admission. You would then compare that data of the "known" shills to your sample group of possible shills, and look for significant correlations.

Yeah, it sounds like a lot of work, but that's the only way to make data mean anything.

Like I've said to you before, I've gotten to watch thousands of auctions as both a buyer and seller. When I am the seller, I know for a fact that there is no shill bidding occurring - and I've seen many newbies (20 and less FB) buyers "low bid" dozens of my items, over long periods of time. I guess it's like the lottery to them - maybe, just maybe, they will win that $100 item for only $5..LOL. I've also seen so many bidders bid in tiny increments that I am firmly convinced that at least half of the people now using ebay don't understand proxy bidding - I don't think a good 1/4 of the bidders using ebay right now even know that there is such a things as proxy bidding.

Knowing what I know, I have a huge problem with anyone looking at raw anonymous bidding stats on any given seller and drawing your conclusions.

You are making an assumption that the stats you are looking at demonstrate "shill activity" when (1) we haven't established what "shill activity" looks like, and (2) we haven't established what "normal activity" looks like.

You are telling me it's "unusually hot" in Australia by giving me the current temperature. For all I know, it's actually cooler than it was last year. Without a baseline of data, the temperature really doesn't mean anything to me. I would need to know things like average temp for this time of year over time - maybe 20 or 30 years - for a short term trend, perhaps 1,000 years or more to show a cyclical trend.

Here is how I see all of you posts:

It's 54 degrees where I am right now. Can you believe that? 54 UNBELIEVABLE degrees! How can anyone in their right mind not see the trend so clear that anyone with half a brain would know that this means the next ice age is coming. Or do the smug little politicians want us all to start buying more and more oil so they can fill their filthy greedy pockets with more of our money! How stupid do they think we are.

Attached is a spreadsheet showing that it's been 54 degress every morning this week. EVERY morning. Nature just doesn't work this way. It's impossible that the same exact temperature is occurring at the same exact time for 7 days. Someone is obviously causing this, or do we believe it's the weather fairies? I think not!

Attached here are aerial satellite photographs of my garden showing the damage to my tomatoes. This is not the kind of damage that can be caused by anything other than NASA weather manipulation designed to put more money into the hands of greedy GE corporate executives.

Why would NASA do this? How can you even ask such a question. Do you work for NASA? Obviously an decrease in global temperatures would mean more funding for NASA launched weather satellites. It is by no coincidence that GE makes these satellites. Yes, the very same satellites that took the pictures of my garden from nearly 20 miles up in space.

Wake up and smell the GE brewed coffee!


Yell, scream, berate me all all day Philip, but your posts don't make a lick of logical or scientific sense...

[PhilipCohen]

Tradguy,

Your exposition of statistical analysis may well be valid but the information required to do any comprehensive analysis is held by eBay and is not public. With bidders masked as they now are one cannot even be sure that two bidders with the same alias and feedback count are, in fact, the same bidder! And the creation of such opacity was undoubtedly eBay’s intention.

I can only work with my limited resources and the limited data that is publicly available. And, anyway, why should I have to do the job that eBay should be doing anyway?

All I have done is present, in a spreadsheet, some facts about the bidding patterns of a number of eBay sellers. I have also offered an opinion on what some of those facts may suggest.

Other than concentrating mainly on $1-start auctions I have not selectively included sellers in the list, that is, if a seller that I otherwise randomly selected did not have a high incidence of common bidders I did not excluded them from the list but deliberately included them as a balancing factor.

I have not attempted to included factors that may have an influence on the valid appearance of common bidders, such as the type of goods; I don’t have the resources to do so. The spreadsheet list therefore represents, as best as I can create, a random selection of eBay sellers mostly using the low-start form of auction.

The opportunity then to analyse the bidding patterns of the two Diamond PowerSellers, presented by eBay in the Auctiva article as major success stories, was another opportunity simply to good to pass up.

So, you having examined the bidding patterns of these two PowerSellers in the spreadsheet, are you now seriously going to offer the opinion that their patterns of bidding do not suggest shill bidding?

It’s just possible that the Rolex guy is also “buying” some of his own Best Offers to try to create the impression that his stuff is moving! (I come to that suspicion because of the mostly chronological contiguous groupings of his “sales” see “Completed listings” and that none of the Best Offer sales (of any real value) have, as yet, had any feedback left for them.)

Now, we would not expect the most recent transactions to have any feedback yet but I thought that maybe some of the earlier Best Offer transactions might, by now (27 October), have some.

And, yes, there is some: for one minor item sold on 14 October for $349.

Let’s hope that I am wrong and that more of these Best Offer items will have feedback posted for them in due course.

Anyway, you always seem to miss the whole point of my campaign against eBay: that eBay, as the “auctioneer,” has a responsibility to protect buyers from the criminal activity of shill bidding, and that I believe that it can be demonstrated that eBay does very little reactively and certainly nothing proactively about such criminal activity on their auctions.

And, as “begs the question” is misused by many people with better word skills than mine, I will then raise the question of why, if you are so smart, you have not been able to get that industry joke, the “Ho Ho Ho,” to cease his ongoing destruction of the eBay marketplace?
_________________
Clearly, the lunatics at eBay have taken over the asylum and are bent on burning it down.
“The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.” ~ Albert Einstein.

[PhilipCohen]

Tradguy,

Still waiting for your opinion on whether or not these two particular Diamond PowerSellers are shill bidders.

The next question to be “raised” is, if, as you claim, you are a seller but not a shill bidding seller, nor are you simply an eBay stooge, what is your interest in this matter? Why do you bother reading my ramblings about the eBafia and its current not-too-bright Don, the “Ho Ho Ho”?

Of course, your inference may be correct, my data may well be short of non-shill-bidding sellers to provide a good baseline: It’s difficult to find many examples of professional sellers who appear not to be shill bidding; indeed the data would suggest that a large majority of professional sellers are shill bidding.

What say you to that hypothesis.

If you think that my analysis is so short of baseline data, by all means give me your eBay ID and I will include a random selection of your non-shilled auctions as an additional base line. Indeed give me an ID of any professional seller that you “know” to be not shill bidding.

Frankly, I find it difficult to believe that you are not an eBay stooge and that your sole reason for being is to drag a smelly red herring around.
_________________
Clearly, the lunatics at eBay have taken over the asylum and are bent on burning it down.
“The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.” ~ Albert Einstein.

[PhilipCohen]

A funny thing happened on the way to the opera.

As at 12 November, "quickshipelectronics" has no current listings and no completed listings; now that is odd for a most successful Titanium PowerSeller; maybe he has reinvented himself and is now trading under another pseudonym?

However, “beckertime” is still trading; their completed listings showing very few islets of green in the oceans of red (a bit like eBay, lots of blood in the water with sharks circling); still with far too many common never-winning bidders habitually plugging away on every 99c-start auction.
_________________
Clearly, the lunatics at eBay have taken over the asylum and are bent on burning it down.
“The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.” ~ Albert Einstein.

[ebuyerfb]

Something you may not be aware of. Did you ever wonder where Beckertime gets their used rolex's? eBay.

I've seen them purchase from rolex sellers in Vietnam (or may have been Korea). Can't tell you how I figured that out though because I'll get into major trouble (the story is actually really funny) but I had 100% proof of this, not just speculation.