Quote:
I must confess to being confused.

I'm actually quite happy to have lost I'm mad because I appeared that the seller was using a fake account to run the bid price up to my maximum bid. The combination of the bids by the 2-day-old-no-purchases-ever bidder along with the almost-no-purchases-ever-bidder that placed one more bid that went over my max, then retracted the bid, leaving me at my max just seemed like really suspicious behavior. Now I could just be totally paranoid and that might be completely legit, but it just seemed a little weird to me. Bid retraction is problematic in my mind, because it allows a bidder to reveal information about other bidders without any penalty. For instance, if these WERE fake bidders, it essentially allowed them to find out the maximum I was willing to bid and run the auction up to that max amount by increasing the bid little by little until they passed me, then retracting the last bid.

As far as my complaints about it being done all wrong, I don't have a problem the auction system itself, I DO have a problem with the feedback and securitysystem.

For instance, feedback should be double-blind and required. Basically, both people should have to submit feedback before either can see it. If someone chooses not to leave feedback, then after a certain timeout period, you should then lose your right to double-blind and the one-sided feedback becomes public.

There should be a much better system than just the single number that represents "trustworthiness". For instance, if someone has a score of 400, but they're only EVER sold/bought $5 items, and now they're selling a laptop for $1600, that is notable. I should be able to see average item sold price, average item bought price, total $ bought/sold. I'd like to be able to see if this item is outside of a buyer's/seller's profile category too.

I think buyers/sellers should have to verify themselves like on Paypal, and eBay could make it clear when the mailing address of the seller/buyer is shared by more than one person, or when the verified mailing address is a PO Box.

Yes, I'm sure there are problems with some of these ideas that would need to be worked out, but I don't use eBay that often and I've got this list. I guarantee you people who use it all the time could come up with things. But when was the last substantive change to the security/feedback system at eBay? I just don't get the impression that they're really trying to address fraud at all. You can't just take the standpoint of addressing it passively, because it usually means you're addressing it after it happened, I believe eBay should be actively pursuing technologies that might fraud harder and/or more obvious.

ms