Solve : Avopid eBay 'buy it now' price switcher.?

1.	Solve : Avopid eBay 'buy it now' price switcher.?
Answer» I like shopping on eBay. But I often find 'Buy It Now' is dishonest. How? When they put a price that can increase , but only the low price is shown. Example: Shop for low price smart phones. Search for phones under $50 and find some 'Buy It Now' items under $15. So you go to order and you must select a color. You choose any col rand the price quadruples. Try it! I have some screenshots here: http://geek9pm.com/ebay Th PNG images are reduced to use less bandwidth, but are very legible. You can see in the three images how the price was rigged to mislead the prospective buyer. The low price shown is not for the smartphone. Trying to contact eBay about this sort of thing is hard to do. So I put this here for others to see. Another reason i refuse to use eBay...i wou;dn't buy a bowlong ball off of there...I've seen this before, however it is important to bear in mind that this is an issue with individual sellers and how they advertise and not a problem caused by eBay directly. The feature allowing variations of an item to be advertised in the same listing is very useful for items like flash drives where there are various different capacities of the same item, this means taht you don't end up with tonnes of listings for each capacity. Unfortunately, sellers will always try and perform these dodgy tactics with their listings to attract more customers, a recent one I found was when I was looking for a gigabit Ethernet switch, I found several listings for 10/100 switches where the title contained "Not Gigabit" so that they would show up in my search results for "Gigabit switch". It would be ideal if eBay could somehow moderate all listings to stop this from happening but I imagine this would be a practically impossible task given the amount of listings. That said, I do absolutely love eBay and buy probably the majority of my technology/computer related stuff. In the UK anyway I've noticed Amazon's service (especially around shipping) getting steadily worse to the extent that I almost always GET a better experience through business sellers on eBay and when it comes to used stuff (which a lot of the stuff I buy is) there is no better option. Sure, we have Craigslist (and Gumtree which is the more popular equivalent in the UK) but those are generally useless, especially when it comes to technology. I've bought everything from components and laptops to servers and enterprise networking hardware and almost never had any issues, then any issues that I have had have always been resolved to my satisfaction.Quote Search for phones under $50 and find some 'Buy It Now' items under $15. So you go to order and you must select a color. You choose any col rand the price quadruples. Try it! I seen this elsewhere other than ebay as well online. However if your careful you will spot it and stop in your tracks before buying something that is much more expensive. My wife for example was going to buy products through amazon and the merchant there had a product at a price that was a good deal, upon selecting a different color bra the price went from $9.99 to $14.99. If she would have went with white it would have been $9.99, but because she made the selection to black it jumped for that that same bra just in a different color to $14.99. This is TRICKERY on behalf of the merchant selling the products, to lure you to a lower price item and then give choices and then the choices change the price tag. I have seen all the more common that a different size item costs more. If its $2 more etc, I can see this justified, however usually there is a price key on the page that specifies that anything 2X and larger for shirt add additional $2 etc. Where as this simple and sneaky method of someone seeing a price of say $9.99 and then they go to select color and size and then the price switches to $14.99 without any warning. Many will go through the motion of making the purchase to later find out that they got ripped off through this trickery. For a price discrepancy of $5, most people will just eat the $5 loss. Going back to complain that there is false advertising also doesnt hold water because if you go back to the same item for sale and then pay attention to the price tag you generally see the price flip from whatever the teaser price was if you went with the color and size that was advertised to the choice which is different than that of the teaser that got you there. It use to be that you just had to worry about something cheap being sold or for auction and getting stiffed with $50 shipping when it only costs $5 tops to ship an item. Ebay years ago had tons of auctions where you can win an action for say a $40 Jacket for 1 cent, then you go to make the purchase and see $49.99 shipping and handling. Most werent that extreme, most were products for sale say a product worth $20 for sale for $10 and then $13 shipping and then it arrives and you see that it cost just $2.60 cents to ship it. But the shipping and Handling part I guess makes it legal to change more since handling costs money I guess and is a very sneaky way to generate additional revenue or play of numbers to where someone thinks they are getting a great deal, but are paying more with some of the margin shifted to the shipping & handling to hide that additional margin that the merchant is receiving if you make that purchase through them. My biggest complaint however was with one merchant years ago on ebay. They had software for sale for $5.99 with $3.99 shipping. I agreed to buy 5 copies of the software and after the fact requested a reduced shipping cost since there is no way it will cost $19.95 to ship that software. They wanted to charge $49.90 which was $19.95 for shipping and $29.95 for the software. I said how about $10 for shipping which is very generous and still more than it will cost to ship the software to me. They stood their ground stating that they do not reduce shipping for multiple copies shipped together. I told them that if I am going to be shipped 5 copies of this and paying $19.95 for shipping, each copy better COME shipped individually. When software arrived, it was in one box. I contacted the seller telling them that they didnt follow my instructions. I left 1 star feedback stating that fact that they do not combine for reduced shipping. And dont follow customer directions. If they shipped me the software individually I would have left 3 stars since they complied with my request since they refused to reduce the shipping costs. But I wanted them if it really costs that much to ship each product, use 5 times the materials for shipping and time of "handling" so that I know that my $19.95 in shipping and handling was properly carried out without cutting corners to increase their profit margin that much more for people buying multiples of software like myself. The switch-a-roo of the pricing though that you saw is taking advantage of "Dark Patterns". http://darkpatterns.org/what_is_a_dark_pattern/ Here is a wall of shame with examples that hasnt been UPDATED in a while but lists some sneaky websites: http://darkpatterns.org/whats-new/ When I come across stuff that isnt quite right online, I save screenshots of it etc to my COLLECTION of mess ups. This one below is my latest cherry pick off the internet. The ad in the middle talks about North Carolina residents, well if you look at the stack of money in the picture you will see its not even American Money. It looks like Czech money maybe. I am connected through a corporate proxy at work that that is based out of North Carolina and thats why the ad targeted me like that for North Carolina even though I am far from there. [attachment deleted by admin to conserve space]

Answer»

I like shopping on eBay.
But I often find 'Buy It Now' is dishonest. How? When they put a price that can increase , but only the low price is shown.
Example: Shop for low price smart phones. Search for phones under $50 and find some 'Buy It Now' items under $15. So you go to order and you must select a color. You choose any col rand the price quadruples. Try it!

I have some screenshots here:
http://geek9pm.com/ebay
Th PNG images are reduced to use less bandwidth, but are very legible. You can see in the three images how the price was rigged to mislead the prospective buyer. The low price shown is not for the smartphone.

Trying to contact eBay about this sort of thing is hard to do. So I put this here for others to see.
Another reason i refuse to use eBay...i wou;dn't buy a bowlong ball off of there...I've seen this before, however it is important to bear in mind that this is an issue with individual sellers and how they advertise and not a problem caused by eBay directly. The feature allowing variations of an item to be advertised in the same listing is very useful for items like flash drives where there are various different capacities of the same item, this means taht you don't end up with tonnes of listings for each capacity. Unfortunately, sellers will always try and perform these dodgy tactics with their listings to attract more customers, a recent one I found was when I was looking for a gigabit Ethernet switch, I found several listings for 10/100 switches where the title contained "Not Gigabit" so that they would show up in my search results for "Gigabit switch". It would be ideal if eBay could somehow moderate all listings to stop this from happening but I imagine this would be a practically impossible task given the amount of listings.

That said, I do absolutely love eBay and buy probably the majority of my technology/computer related stuff. In the UK anyway I've noticed Amazon's service (especially around shipping) getting steadily worse to the extent that I almost always GET a better experience through business sellers on eBay and when it comes to used stuff (which a lot of the stuff I buy is) there is no better option. Sure, we have Craigslist (and Gumtree which is the more popular equivalent in the UK) but those are generally useless, especially when it comes to technology. I've bought everything from components and laptops to servers and enterprise networking hardware and almost never had any issues, then any issues that I have had have always been resolved to my satisfaction.Quote

Search for phones under $50 and find some 'Buy It Now' items under $15. So you go to order and you must select a color. You choose any col rand the price quadruples. Try it!

I seen this elsewhere other than ebay as well online. However if your careful you will spot it and stop in your tracks before buying something that is much more expensive. My wife for example was going to buy products through amazon and the merchant there had a product at a price that was a good deal, upon selecting a different color bra the price went from $9.99 to $14.99. If she would have went with white it would have been $9.99, but because she made the selection to black it jumped for that that same bra just in a different color to $14.99.

This is TRICKERY on behalf of the merchant selling the products, to lure you to a lower price item and then give choices and then the choices change the price tag. I have seen all the more common that a different size item costs more. If its $2 more etc, I can see this justified, however usually there is a price key on the page that specifies that anything 2X and larger for shirt add additional $2 etc. Where as this simple and sneaky method of someone seeing a price of say $9.99 and then they go to select color and size and then the price switches to $14.99 without any warning. Many will go through the motion of making the purchase to later find out that they got ripped off through this trickery. For a price discrepancy of $5, most people will just eat the $5 loss. Going back to complain that there is false advertising also doesnt hold water because if you go back to the same item for sale and then pay attention to the price tag you generally see the price flip from whatever the teaser price was if you went with the color and size that was advertised to the choice which is different than that of the teaser that got you there.

It use to be that you just had to worry about something cheap being sold or for auction and getting stiffed with $50 shipping when it only costs $5 tops to ship an item. Ebay years ago had tons of auctions where you can win an action for say a $40 Jacket for 1 cent, then you go to make the purchase and see $49.99 shipping and handling. Most werent that extreme, most were products for sale say a product worth $20 for sale for $10 and then $13 shipping and then it arrives and you see that it cost just $2.60 cents to ship it. But the shipping and Handling part I guess makes it legal to change more since handling costs money I guess and is a very sneaky way to generate additional revenue or play of numbers to where someone thinks they are getting a great deal, but are paying more with some of the margin shifted to the shipping & handling to hide that additional margin that the merchant is receiving if you make that purchase through them.

My biggest complaint however was with one merchant years ago on ebay. They had software for sale for $5.99 with $3.99 shipping. I agreed to buy 5 copies of the software and after the fact requested a reduced shipping cost since there is no way it will cost $19.95 to ship that software. They wanted to charge $49.90 which was $19.95 for shipping and $29.95 for the software. I said how about $10 for shipping which is very generous and still more than it will cost to ship the software to me. They stood their ground stating that they do not reduce shipping for multiple copies shipped together. I told them that if I am going to be shipped 5 copies of this and paying $19.95 for shipping, each copy better COME shipped individually. When software arrived, it was in one box. I contacted the seller telling them that they didnt follow my instructions. I left 1 star feedback stating that fact that they do not combine for reduced shipping. And dont follow customer directions. If they shipped me the software individually I would have left 3 stars since they complied with my request since they refused to reduce the shipping costs. But I wanted them if it really costs that much to ship each product, use 5 times the materials for shipping and time of "handling" so that I know that my $19.95 in shipping and handling was properly carried out without cutting corners to increase their profit margin that much more for people buying multiples of software like myself.

The switch-a-roo of the pricing though that you saw is taking advantage of "Dark Patterns". http://darkpatterns.org/what_is_a_dark_pattern/

Here is a wall of shame with examples that hasnt been UPDATED in a while but lists some sneaky websites: http://darkpatterns.org/whats-new/

When I come across stuff that isnt quite right online, I save screenshots of it etc to my COLLECTION of mess ups. This one below is my latest cherry pick off the internet. The ad in the middle talks about North Carolina residents, well if you look at the stack of money in the picture you will see its not even American Money. It looks like Czech money maybe. I am connected through a corporate proxy at work that that is based out of North Carolina and thats why the ad targeted me like that for North Carolina even though I am far from there.

[attachment deleted by admin to conserve space]

Solve : Avopid eBay 'buy it now' price switcher.?

Discussion

No Comment Found

Related InterviewSolutions

Reply to Comment