The Safeguarding Members Id's policy came into effect earlier this week
following a trial period on eBay Motors for the last month or so. The
substitute bidder identities appear as an item goes over a price threshold
of $200 for the US site (it is I think 100 pounds for the UK site). The
intention is to reduce fraudulent second chance offers by removing under
bidder id's from public view. As a seller all of the bidders id's will be
visible to you but only while the auction is running.
One of the major concerns I have is that this scheme will make shill bidding
easier to hide. It is now impossible for active eBay community members to
report concerns of shill bidding as they have lost the facility to research
and link id's. As others have mentioned one of eBay's main concerns is to
guard fee income and it is a fact that regardless of the illegal nature of
shill bidding it is beneficial to eBay's bottom line. Sadly eBay do not have
as good a track record on dealing with this type of problem as they could.
There is a concern that they need to be seen doing something about this
problem but not necessarily be very effective at stopping it. Though I will
note the SMI policy is not really about stopping shill biding.
Another effect of the policy is that only the high bidder id will be
revealed on the listing page at the close of auction. The side effect of
this change is that searching based on a bidder id will now only show
winning bids if you select the closed listing option. I used to use this
search feature for several purposes including: evaluating if it is worth
attempting to bid against someone, if they are page marker and snipe bidder
and if they have been trying to buy an item at a certain price level.
It will also now be difficult to assess if you bidding against on higher
value items. Be it a list member or someone like Alex. I know for instance
that there are certain apparently deep pocketed id's that I see in the pro
audio categories that I know there is no point even trying to bid against.
Oh well... As I have heard on some the eBay community message boards
regarding this subject there is little that can be done to undo it and in a
couple of months it will just be another part of the system and no one will
think to mention it.
Sorry for the rambling...
Dan S.
> [mailto:olympus-owner@xxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of David Carter
> Subject: [OM] Re: yabe hides ID's
>
> It must be selective. Possibly set up by the seller. I seem
> to remember there being an option allowing sellers to make
> bidders ID's private.
>
> I had an auction finished earlier this week, with all 8
> bidders ID's visible
>
> David
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