posted on October 12, 2000 09:59:57 PM
eBay tonight announced changes to the bid history page, among other things. Most notable, the bid history will show each individual bid, even if a bidder made multiple bids. Previously it only showed the final highest bid.
Interestingly, this change affects all closed auctions still in the database- so you can look at any of your closed auctions with multiple bids by one bidder, and see when and how much he/she bid. Kinda interesting.
Looks like these changes might help make shilling and shielding a little more obvious. Here's the announcement:
*******
*** BID HISTORY and BIDDER SEARCH ENHANCEMENTS ***
Dear eBay members,
Today, we are rolling out exciting changes to the Bid History and Bidder Search pages. These changes were requested by many of you to help improve your visibility to how transactions are conducted on eBay and provide you with productivity enhancements. In particular, many of you requested a more complete view of bid information to address concerns of shill bidding, retractions, and sniping and other bidding-related questions.
BID HISTORY PAGE CHANGES
We will now display ALL non-retracted bids in the Bid History section of the page. The list will be sorted as it is today (by bid amount, descending). This will apply to single-item transactions only. NOTE: The former system listed only the highest bid from each bidder
In addition, all retractions will be displayed separately in the Bid Retraction and Cancellation History Section along with individual explanations. This also applies to cancellations by the seller. The Retracted bid amount and Date of Bid will also be displayed. This change will apply to single item and Dutch transactions.
BIDDER SEARCH PAGE CHANGE
We have added the Seller ID to the Bidder Search results page and the ability to sort by the Seller ID. If multiple items were bid on or won from the same seller, these items can be conveniently sorted together. This will allow bidders to consolidate payments and perhaps even facilitate processing and shipping for sellers.
We appreciate your suggestions and involvement in this issue.
Thank you,
eBay
******
AND- it's an enhancement made at no charge to users!
posted on October 12, 2000 10:19:45 PMAND- it's an enhancement made at no charge to users!
Don't be so sure. eBay has been running like crap all week. I suspect the slowdowns and outages are due to internal tinkering and "enhancements." These problems almost always seem to crop up just as eBay rolls out new features.
The poor performance has hurt many of us financially. I consider that a "charge," and a very expensive one at that.
posted on October 12, 2000 11:57:48 PM
I just checked mine - Some of the multiple bids are bids that were done by the proxy bidding and not entered individually each time.
I had one that had one bidder bidding 5 times, but you can tell by the other bids that he entered on bid, and then other bidders came along and tried to get over his high bid. This resulted in the proxy bid going in automatically each time, hence he only bid once, but 5 bids were placed.
posted on October 13, 2000 03:50:33 AM
Also from the same announcement:
[i]BIDDER SEARCH PAGE CHANGE
We have added the Seller ID to the Bidder Search results page and the ability to sort by the Seller ID. If multiple items were bid on or won from the same seller, these items can be conveniently sorted together. This will allow bidders to consolidate payments and perhaps even facilitate processing and shipping for sellers.[/i]
Well, well, well. Here's the answer to the question of how Safe Harbor will ever be able to take up the slack left by closing the T&S discussion board to discussions of specific shilling situations. Ebay has instituted a couple of nice little tools to give them detailed info about the bidding in each auction and between specific sellers and bidders that wasn't available before, making it easier to peg questionable bidding patterns. Problem is, you have to know what to do with a tool before you can use it, and there's still a lot of slack left...... Is the timing of Ebay's "no shill detectives on the boards" stance and this announcement coincidental? I question it.
[ edited by pickersangel on Oct 13, 2000 03:54 AM ]
posted on October 13, 2000 05:04:48 AM
Alternatively, I wonder how much the New York Times article in July(?) about an alleged art scam contributed to this action by Ebay. It was very critical of the fact that only the final bid by any individual was shown and that they could not follow the real bidding activity on the infamous auction that triggered that article.
I suspect that Ebay is more interested in good press by appearing to be thwarting shill bidding, than in copying features used on Yahoo!
Go to "search" then "bidder" and you will see the seller info now shows up on the right and all bids can be sorted by seller.
Click on the "Bid History" of an auction that received numerous bids and you will see multiple bids by the same person with the date and time. This did not show up before, only their first bid time.
posted on October 13, 2000 07:13:01 AM
This new bidder history is of little consequence (other than to entertain us).
I am not impressed. Once the last bid is down, I go on to the next listing.
I spend very little time looking back.
No point whatsoever. JMHO
posted on October 13, 2000 07:19:27 AM
Nice feature but we're still waiting for ebay to add some search/filter functionality to feedback. If we're a seller and someone has 10 negs out of 500 feedbacks it would be great to see just those negs.
posted on October 13, 2000 07:35:51 AMartsnflies: I really doubt that eBay will ever institute a utility that allows people to see onlynegs and neutrals, because they should be reviewed in context of the rest of the file.
They did, however, add a new feature on the feedback pages wherein you can choose how much feedback you want to see on one page. So, just select "500," let the page load, then use your browser's Find in Page function to look for "complaint."
posted on October 13, 2000 05:01:30 PM
G'day,
I have withdrawn the item number below because I can't be bothered jumping through hoops to gain permission from 2 prople that have been NARU'd from Ebay to give a live example, so you will need to find your own example of bid shielding to fully research this post, which was also made elsewhere and probably makes more sense there:
One aspect of the sniper that is exposed with this dual time-stamping is that you can now look through bid histories to establish whether someone places "bookmark" bids and then later in the auction returns to bid higher or to snipe at the death knock.
As far as retractions go, they have actually removed one of the features that identified shill and sheilding related bidding within the last 12 months. Retractions and cancellations until relatively recently showed up in bidding lists - you could then identify sellers who just cancelled all bids on an auction that they felt wasn't making enough (a useful bit of info to stop you wasting time on their unreserved lists) and more importantly could look for links with other bidders/sellers when that individual had retracted.
This auction was from a friend of mine and shows a bid retraction which was proven to be bid shielding (thus two users are NARU):
deleted auction bid history URL
As you can see, the retracted bid was for $1250, and the auction sat at $1225 from the time that that bid had been made until 34 minutes before the auction closed. This killed the auction for anyone who viewed it in between those times. The auction finished at less than $400.
Now if you look at the bid list of the ID who retracted, you will not find this auction (12 months ago you would have) nor any of the other 3 auctions that they retracted bids from in the last month. Thus Ebay has given a tool that the New York Times demanded in order to help identify shill activity, but removed a tool that was crucial in identifying that activity.
Why?????? I don't understand. Explanations are welcome.
