e bay gum; a Yorkshireman writes.

So there's ebay, all over the front of the Sunday Times, and some antiquities dealer is torn apart inside.

I use ebay quite a lot. I currently have 33 items for sale. And I think ebay ask for trouble. I am certain that their policies make illegal practice inevitable, even, gasp, e n c o u r a g e it, and I'm delighted that the backlash has started. Ebay is a necessary evil, but I so wish it was just an evil.

Problems with ebay:
1. The seller gets virtually no protection. If a buyer pays with PayPal and complains, ebay credits them their money back immediately without any investigation and debits the seller who rarely, if ever, gets the debit refunded: not even if you can prove delivery was made! And believe me, there are more crooked buyers out there than crooked sellers.

2. Seller are unable to protect themselves with sensible reserves:
2.1 You can't put a reserve on under £50, unless you are in the US where it's $20 - and that's some discrepancy! It means that more buyers use shill bidding in the £20-£50 bracket than any other. Why should any professional dealer put something on ebay and then risk selling it for less than cost just because it's worth under £50? You only need a few to go like that and the losses soon add up. I fail to see why I should sponsor other people's ebay habit with non-profit making deals. I get round it by putting things into a shop and having them as 'inventory'. Others pull auctions at the last minute, or use family and friends to bid items up to their cost price.
All they are doing is providing themselves with the protection that ebay won't give them. How is it a rip off if you pay a fair price for something? After all, you don't HAVE to bid!
2.2 Reserves are too damn expensive. You don't pay to put a reserve on something in a 'proper' auction house, yet on ebay you have to pay a percentage of the value, upfront.
Normally it costs me 43p to list something. I listed something with a modest reserve of £68 the other day and it cost £3.43. It's a policy that encourages people not to put a reserve on, and use other, ahem, 'means' of self-protection. If the guy in the article in the Sunday Times puts reserves on his things it might cost him £100 (I'm guessing, I never have anything that expensive to sell), and you get charged that whether your item sells, or not. It's a rip off, and it's also a bad policy because it encourages people to be er, creative about protecting their investment.

3. Ebay itself. It's very secretive, and people I know who have been suspended incorrectly have had the devils own job getting it lifted, even though they have done nothing wrong. And ebay's 'customer relations' are a joke. They embody the worst traits of not listening, not responding and assuming that you are a useless little fly on the back of the mighty all powerful ebay. They are curt and rude. I know, I've been there for some help. Arrogant is not the word. We made a fine pair. Mwah.

Hopefully all this will finally start to devour ebay from within. Because although I use it I do so because I have to: it's all but destroyed the old fashioned way of buying things - I would be so much happier if it were to implode.

And actually, if you use ebay as a buyer so would you. You've just fallen for the hype if you think it's marvellous. Yes, you can get the odd bargain, but generally these are few and far between, and there is so much cheap and fake stuff on there that the chances are you'll be ripped off anyway. Shill bidding, which is so prevalent because of ebay's divisive and ill-advised policies, is a minor irritation compared to the fakes and forgeries you are all being sold.

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Oh, ahem, well, since you ask, I'd say 80-90%.
Yes, 80-90% of sellers on ebay use shill bidding in one form or another.
And it's not necessary, if only ebay would look at things a bit more, well, sensibly