I saw on the news last night that eBay is closing their Canadian call centre, but it’s not to cut costs, oh no, it’s to capture efficiencies and enhance the customer experience. Of course!

I felt a bit guilty for not shopping on eBay enough recently so I decided to shop around for stuff that wasn’t complete crap to give them a hand. I found a lovely Vivienne Westwood ring, for ten bucks. Bargain! (A gen-u-wine one I’m sure.) I put in my bid and was going to win it until I got outbid this morning. I rushed back to check eventually and the person who’d outbid me had 247 feedback, all positive, but these days there is a privacy measure so that people can’t see all the crap you bid on. I looked at their profile, regardless, and at the sellers they’d been bidding on, of their total bidding, 22% was with this seller! Um, what? That seems like a lot of cut-price designer jewellery for one person. Son-of-a…. that stinks, man.

I know I was bidding on some stuff that’s probably not as genuine as it should be, but usually stuff starts out cheap and goes up, that is the nature of ebay and the reason I like it, you pay fair market value for the goods, and it’s up to the sellers to make sure that their pictures and description are good enough to give you the confidence to bid. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, a shill bidder is a bidder who is just there to artificially inflate the price by placing bids which then (in theory) get bid over again by the real buyer. It’s totally not tolerated on eBay but seems to go on anyway. I’ve won and lost my share of bidding wars, but who is going to try to win a bidding war with an opponent who is just trying to squeeze you and has no desire to actually win the thing. No thanks, there’s no sport in it.

I’ve moved on, now I’m going to stick to buying sensible things on eBay… you can never have enough hats, shoes and gloves.

Postscript

They sent me a second-chance offer on the item. I have an urge to send them an “aww, your shill bidder didn’t come through? Bummer” e-mail but I’m trying to restrain myself.