Buying a bike off Ebay: The Good, Bad and Ugly

[malkin]

Nice!
I hope it gets to you really really fast!

If you look at completed auctions, you can see that your seller was on his third try at selling it.

If you look at his feedback, you can see that he sells bike stuff, and one fb is for a rather high ticket item.

If you look at the time stamps on the bid history, you can see that your counter bidder was nibbling to get at your proxy...but your proxy had the moxy!!

[emily_in_nc]

And (this is always a shot in the dark), but have you contacted the buyer with an offer? Some people don't mind selling early if they know they will get the price they were looking for. Good luck!

"Some people" are breaking ebay rules if they do that. Sellers are not allowed to offer an item for auction on ebay and then pull the auction, cancel existing bids, and sell "off ebay". It's just not allowed and is extremely unethical. Now, if they have an "or best offer" attached to their fixed-price listing, that's a totally different thing. Or, if their item doesn't sell and they hear from someone interested after the fact who wished they'd bid after all, the seller can re-list the item with a Buy-it-now so that the buyer can then do the BIN. But they definitely can't pull the auction and take a private offer in the middle of an auction.

Cherinyc, congratulations on winning the auction! That's a beautiful bike!

Emily

[cherinyc]

Nice!
I hope it gets to you really really fast!

If you look at completed auctions, you can see that your seller was on his third try at selling it.

malkin - how did you see that he had tried selling it 2 times before? Gosh I am such an Ebay rookie.

I hope it gets to me really really fast too! (but safely of course)

[smurfalicious]

Congrats but OMG NOOOOO to DHL! When I worked at T-Mobile we used DHL for a very short time period. After months of "I didn't get my phone," or "I swear on everything holy that I sent my warranty phone back" and the awful service experience it created we dumped them like a hot rock. Mind you a lot of the shipments were DHL @ Home and I think they f'ed up the hand off process to USPS a lot but I have nightmares when I see those trucks.