While at Concorso Italiano Friday, August 14th, a couple of eBay account reps were walking around asking opinions of their motor auction service. eBay was a sponsor of the event so it made sense to be doing market research. They’re walking my way . . . a little closer . . . I scootch conveniently into their path . . . . Hi, how are you? We are from eBay Motors and are asking people about our auction service. Do you use it to sell cars and parts? Where do I begin? It has lost all its luster for selling cars for me and I’ve really tried a range of different scenarios from reserve to no reserve, to Buy it Now, to having the vehicle inspected, etc. These are the reasons I’m not using it anymore.
1. The auctions only last 7 to 10 days
This is hardly enough time for someone to make any real decisions assuming they saw the post when it was fresh. With so many yahoos bending the truth about their car, the only way to really know if it is worth the bid, is to go see. Trying to book a flight inside of two weeks gets costly. Trying to figure it out with pictures and phone calls gets frustrating. If you are lucky enough to be close, arranging the time and/or inspections can be a hassle.
Solution: Call someone in the associated car club to look at it for you. Independent inspections are good if you can get it done. As I told eBay, have longer auctions. The forums, Craiglist and Autotrader can run lifetime ads (with Craiglist you have to relist it).
2. People bid up the auction with a dummy account to see your reserve
After you’ve gone through weeks of preparation: cleaning and shooting the car, summarizing service history, doing the writeup and building the ad, the relief you start to feel as the auction comes to a close verges on overwhelming. You are finally going to sell your baby. Then, the good-for-nothing jackass toys with your emotions and sticks it to you with a dummy account. He has zero or one feedback and nobody actually buys the car. Worse yet, you paid the listing fee.
Solution: Lock out bidders with no or negative feedback. eBay now lets you list for free, you pay when it sells.
3. You have to be brutally honest; or do you?
I had a heavily modified 1989 BMW 535i. I put it up on eBay at no reserve. The car was old with 180,000 miles but it was still loved and looked terrific. I sold it for $2,300. Two years later I happened to see my car listed on eBay by the guy who bought it from me. Cosmic forces in play for sure. The write up said he did all the modifications to the car, lied about other things plus had 220,000 miles on it now. His starting bid was $3000 and he got it.
Solution: I don’t have one. What line do you draw between your truth and the other guys slimy sales person spin? Receiving eBay negative feedback on such a big ticket item as a car is not good, especially for someone who likes to trade them. I have been working on my 100% positive feedback since 2000 and I wanted to build a trustworthy car trading reputation.
4. Deals often happen after the auction ends
I’ve had several cars on eBay, from BMWs to a Toyota FJ-40 to an Infiniti G35 coupe. A lot of people called me as soon as the auction was over and wanted to make a deal. “Saw the car didn’t make reserve, what do you want for it?” eBay then becomes an expensive way to advertise. And if the deal is done outside of the auction, you don’t get the positive feedback to build your ID.
Solution: Use a the “Best Offer” option. I’ve never used it but it sounded like a plan.
5. People tie up the car after winning the bid trying to resell it
I had one guy buy the car, pay the NON-refundable $1000 deposit but then drag the closing for almost six weeks. He was in constant communication but never came to get the car. My guess is that he was trying to flip it to some perspective client. I was so tired after the experience, I sat on the car for months before trying to sell it again.
I went on and on to these reps but since I hadn’t tried to sell a car since last year, I didn’t know they modified the listing fees. Now, the Insertion Fee is free for the first four cars within one year. The Successful Listing Fee (sold) is a flat $125 for cars with a $7 reserve. The fifth car, and those after, are charged $20 insertion and $100 success. To eBay’s credit they have made some good updates and attempted to address a lot of my concerns.
However, if they took anything away from our conversation, eBay has been more of a hassle than it’s worth and I’m burned out on it. I’m most likely not going back since the other sell sites I mentioned work well. As a side note, I am still a big fan of eBay Motors for selling parts and looking for cars. But when it comes time to sell my 1991 M5, I’ll probably give Bring a Trailer a whirl. People can call me if interested, arrange for a visit and I don’t have to put up with the intense anxiety of an auction to add to the anxiety I already have about selling the car.
Read more of Paul’s work at blog.motorcarmarket.com
I’ve about had it with ebay period, Motors or no. Not only the issues mentioned in the article, but the insistance of PayPal being used, at least discouraging or even prohibiting money orders as accepted payment. Craigslist will be the death of Ebay is my guess.
That said, I did recently profit $1,500 on a single guitar flipped from local Craigslist. Other than the occaisional high end profit like that, the fees are too much to bother with. The ebay and PayPal fees alone on the guitar auction were nearly $230.
“Solution: Lock out bidders with no or negative feedback.”
I’ve never bought anything on E-Bay. I am trustworthy. If I made a bid, then the bid would be for real.
You’re telling me to go screw. How nice of you.
eBay is not a great place for buying and selling cars for all the reasons listed above. I used to be a big time seller of automotive literature and various photographic items on ebay, but that was almost ten years ago before every dingbat on the planet started selling on eBay. These days I only rarely use eBay.
“Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded.”
— Yogi Berra
dejal
He’s saying no such thing. It’s his property and he has at least a few rights to protect himself from the problems of internet auctions. You’ve never done ebay? Then you are not aware of how any of it works and are very likely to have a problem with a large transaction like a car.
I’ve done a lot of ebay deals and I sympathize with Paul. There are entire countries I won’t ship to again, they can go screw as far as I am concerned until they fix their crooked customs and post office systems.
I bought my Miata through an ebay-only dealer – was the high bidder but didn’t hit the reserve, so we negotiated a price. It worked out, but the uncertainty is not for the faint of heart.
The PayPal thing is annoying though. I do not have, and will not have, a PayPal account because of the security holes in it. But it’s okay; I’ve probably saved a lot of money not buying things from sellers who only accept PayPal.
I’d like to see our elected officials take a look at the too cozy relationship Ebay has with it’s non bank known as paypal. Paypal also seems to operate under a few rules even the worse banks don’t do. Mandating a paypal account for bidding and transaction clearing cost ebay a lot, their revenue took a hit from that decision.
I’d like to see google step up with an alternative. It would be a hit since the name recognition of google makes an auction site under their wing possible. Starve ebay out on listing fees and final value costs until they come around.
But fraud is a problem for all auction sites. Getting paid and getting merchandise is a real challenge. I submit that big ticket items probably should not go through the internet with a hope and a prayer. In the end the transaction should still be face to face. And the 7-10 day window is WAY too short. A month would be better with a BIN or Best Offer option as well.
dejal : Many sellers are aware that not everybody iis an eBay veteran. I’ve seen many sellers ask that you call or contact them via phone or email if you have little or no feedback.
My friend tried to sell his blue G35 on eBay, just like the one in the picture, back in 2003. Just as Paul says, it was a huge hassle.
I guess I’m one of the small problems to eBay car sellers – I’ve asked a couple of people a question or two but never bid. I was serious at the time but saw too many internet horror stories to actually pull the trigger on any of them.
OTOH, I never even look at Reserve auctions – it feels too much as if the seller is playing games, and I’m already half disbelieving them anyway. I’d have much more confidence in him if the seller just listed his reasonable minimum price – no head games, just the minimum he’d take, plus a reasonable guarantee that it would make all the way back to my house from his.
I buy the occasional item on eBay, not enough to generate feedback. Rule No. 2 would knock me out of the running.
dejal, you may not beleive me on this, but the on the one and only auction I ran for a car, I didn’t allow rookie bidders…because I truly wanted to protect their interests.
You can snicker all you want in disbelief, but when I sold on eBay I’d gladly sell a sub-$100 item to a newbie. It’s a great way to introduce others to the marketplace without exposing them to much risk, plus it allows them to get a feel for how eBay works (or occasionally, doesn’t work).
When I found myself with a Corvair convertible in my garage that hadn’t been started since put into winter storage three years prior, I opened with a $100 minimum (no reserve) AND was brutally honest, to the point that the buyer told me the car was better than he expected. But I didn’t want some poor sucker to get stuck with a car he thought he could just gas up, crank and drive off into the sunset. Despite my disclosures, I still got more than a few semi-illiterate emails from newbies asking, “but y it no run?”
So all in all, yeah, I probably could’ve made another $500 to $1,000 on some kid with a dream of getting a fully restored car for under $5,000. But you know what? I need my peace of mind to sleep at night. And I don’t need the hassle of dealing with a disgruntled buyer who unleashes eBay and/or his attorney on me.
Yeah, yeah, “buyer beware” and all that stuff, but I hope I’m not the only person with a conscience out there in auction-land.
Craigslist
autotrader.com
cars.com
There may be downsides for sellers, but not much for buyers, I think–with a little due caution. I’ve bought my last three cars there and bid on a lot more. All three I won were from dealers out of state, and I have to say, all three vehicles were exactly as advertised and very satisfactory.
Since I never buy anything but cars there, my feedback is a little skimpy, but I always send a message to the seller saying, hey, I’m bidding, I’m for real, call me at this number if you want. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t, but I’ve never been blocked from bidding.
I will say this, though–ask every detail about the titling procedure. State law varies widely on this. If the selling dealer is part of a chain, their titling paperwork may be done thousands of miles away by people who never heard of you or the salesman. And if they like to use a title company, be sure you understand all about that and get the company’s contact info. The alternative is weeks and months of running back to the courthouse for more temporary tags (yes, I found out by experience).
But overall, for the buyer with time and patience, I think ebay’s the best way to go.
“Saw the car didn’t make reserve, what do you want for it?” eBay then becomes an expensive way to advertise.
If eBay is now free to list, isn’t it a really cheap way to advertise?
I have to say that I have had good luck on both eBay and Craiglist selling and buying my personal cars over the years. I’ve had some cars sell in the auction but a couple sold after the auction like you describe and I and the seller were really happy with the results.
I really like Craigslist, but there is a similar list of frustrations with that site.
My main gripe is that they pull down ads that receive complaints from the “community” without any explanation or appeal. Granted, it’s free so you can’t even complain, but it is a total pain. I also seem to think that many of the reports are from competing sellers as I can never find any policy being broken in my listings. It’s an easy way to remove competition.
If I have counted correctly, in the past 10 years I have bought a total of 12 cars, of which 8 were eBay cars. Of the eBay cars, one was a bad deal I was able to undo (’79 Eldo that had no brakes, seller refunded $$$ on the spot), one was a horribly misrepresented car I resold on eBay at about a 35% loss (’85 Mercedes), one was a beater with more issues than I expected but it was an $800 car I resold for $900 (’75 Caddy), and the other 5 were very good cars at good prices (’76 Caddy, ’92 Town Car, ’93 Olds Ciera wagon, ’74 Caddy, ’05 Town Car; still have the last 2 of those).
For the last purchase (’05 Town Car) I really tried hard not to use eBay, but I gave that up. I live in a smaller city and the selection of good used cars here is atrocious if you are not looking for a minivan, SUV or a Honda. I guess it’s addictive; once you know there is that incredible cornucopia of cars just a few mouse clicks away, it’s hard to settle for the locally available selections. And if I wanted to find something like a ’74 Fleetwood Brougham within a 50 mile radius, well, I would have about as much chance of stumbling across another Hope Diamond.
What a great spot on assessment of Ebay. I have had the same experiences. On the subject of “best offer”, it works no better. I only have success with parts, not cars or motorcycles.
I have been an ebay member since 2000. I’ve bought lots of stuff and sold a few items over the years. Never had a problem. I even sold an old marine Loran system I almost threw away to an overseas buyer for over $500.00. I had it listed with a marine radio antenna and another member emailed me and told me what I had and that I should list them separately. I did and the antenna sold for almost $250.00. I used his letter as copy for my new ad. I Bought a classic car in late 2007 sight unseen from over 1000 miles away. Reputable seller with great feedback. The 30 year old car was better than described. Nicer than anything available locally. Not bragging but I guess I’ve been very lucky.
“I will say this, though–ask every detail about the titling procedure. State law varies widely on this. If the selling dealer is part of a chain, their titling paperwork may be done thousands of miles away by people who never heard of you or the salesman. And if they like to use a title company, be sure you understand all about that and get the company’s contact info. The alternative is weeks and months of running back to the courthouse for more temporary tags (yes, I found out by experience).”
I have purchased two cars from private sellers. I would never buy a car that did not come with a free and clear title at the time of the sale.
Twotone
Ebay is the last place in America where “Caveat Emptor” still truly prevails. I have had some really excellent deals and some really crappy experiences. There are excellent deals to be had but they are not for the faint of heart and certainly should not be done by those who cannot afford to eat the entire price. Ebay is also good where you need to aggregate a buyer/seller pool for liquidity. Someday I’ll get myself a Lotus and it probably will be from somewhere like Ebay. It’s the only place to get a selection.
Part of the problem with ebay is they still have that idiot running Ebay Partner Network. Now they have opened war on affiliates. They are going to pay them per click, whatever they think is right based on some hidden formula. That will be the end of ebay as no sane affiliate will put up with that. Without the affiliates, the legs of the company, ebay is NOTHING.
http://forums.ebay.com/db2/topic/Ebay-Partner-Network/The-Uncertainty-In/510127474
http://forums.ebay.com/db2/topic/Ebay-Partner-Network/Quality-Click-Pricing/520144740
I remember last year I found some Hawk Brake pads for my STi for slightly lower than retail. That + 30% live.com (now bing.com) cashback made it a good deal. Other than using it with cashback, I don’t really use ebay any more.
Scary fact – eBay has a large ownership stake in craigslist – hopefully they wont ruin it.
A few months back, I got burned by a combination of my own ignorance and circumstance. I had a bidder (who had the high bid). With just minutes to go, I got a new bid from a buyer with a zero feedback/bid history. Here’s the dumb part: the username was Imouttahere. Of course, he/she lived up to the name. I’m certain that the high bidder simply created a new account and outbid himself. Since the bid happened with so little time left, I couldn’t cancel it.
The issue, for me, was that I had had several decent bids that would have resulted in a sale. In the end, we ended up trading the car in. My wife (who is an excellent negotiator) got us a price that wasn’t too far off the next-best bid and we had no hassles with getting paid.
I find ebay to be a great place for the buying and selling of things that have limited (not mass-market) appeal. That tends to weed out the scam artists and the buyer pool tends to be well-educated about the items being offered.
Thanks for the informative link to Bringatrailer.com. Great site and they seem to really know their cars and are enthusiastic about the car world.
Let’s face it – there is no shortage of scammers and tricksters. Web sites are a useful way of putting buyers in touch with sellers but safest way is to complete the deal in person so you can prospect the buyer and as well as any involved lenders. This may limit your potential buyers but I’ve never found that to be a problem.
I tried eBay once and found it to be a haven for scam and rip-off. I listed a software package (AutoCAD) in an unopened/sealed box. A detailed description of the product and close-up photos of the front and back of the box were submitted to eBay. Bidding was predictable, but at the last minute, the winning bidder submitted a bid that was nearly double that of the highest bidder. I shipped the software immediately while several days later, payment was received. No more than a couple of days afterwards, I received an email from the winning bidder requesting a refund because, supposedly, the software was not as described. I replied with a question, “has the packaging been opened?” He claimed he had to open it to discover it wasn’t as I had described it on eBay. I told him, “no refund…the software had been opened.” Longer story short, eBay sided with the buyer…there was absolutely NO way to communicate with a real person at eBay or PayPal except through email. PayPal, through Wells Fargo Bank, even attempted to access my Visa account and then my checking account! I had to close both accounts to prevent their attempts.
Never again. As they say, fool me once, shame on you…fool me twice, shame on me.
stevelovescars wrote (referring to craigslist):
My main gripe is that they pull down ads that receive complaints from the “community” without any explanation or appeal
You can post your flagged ad to the craigslist help forums (they have one for “why was my post flagged”). I’ve watched that forum every once in a while, everyone posts there saying “there was absolutely nothing wrong with this ad!!!” and within minutes the multiple problems with it are revealed. For cars the most common ones are: not local, no price listed, and dealer/owner misrepresentation (i.e., a dealer posting as “for sale by owner”).
To the author of this article or anyone else counting on using the buyer’s feedback info as a warning: ebay changed their system recently to prevent sellers from leaving negative feedback for buyers. They claimed they did this to make buyers more confident about giving frank reviews without fearing retaliation. But that change makes it impossible for a buyer to have negative feedback, unless they are also a really bad seller.
I have a question, sort of related. I was recently looking for a car, I searched Craigslist on a daily basis and was frustrated to death. I ran into an ad for a 1 owner 1995 XJR sounded nice and the price was good. No contact info except throught the CL email. I emailed this guy several times with no response whatsoever. I sent emails to dozens of listings that elicited no responce. I saw ads that were totally unbelievable, like the BMW 330i in pristine condition for 10k. Is there a scam afoot? what benefit is there for these ad placers? I don’t get it. Oh yeah and email when you want to sell the M5…
Not sure if I can answer the scam afoot question, if it’s too good to be true… Craiglist does offer “flag this posting” as an option. If enough people determine that it is a scam, the ad will be removed. If you want to talk more about the M5, feel free to email me and we can chat. Paul “at” MotorCarMarket.com
Look at it this way: The guy who bought the Beemer with 180k miles and $2,300 and sold at 220k for $3,000 miles had sunk maintenance costs of $5,000. Just to keep it running.
There are alot of sites that enable you to purhcase a car online. ebay brings nothing to the table that you cant get from another site, in my humble opinion.
re: Ebay owns a large share of craigslist.
From Craigslist FAQ:
Q: Is there a connection between craigslist and eBay?
A: eBay acquired 25% of the equity in craigslist from a former shareholder in august of 2004.
5 years have come and gone and I’ve yet to see any downside to this. I consider myself a Power Craigslister, both buying and selling. Also, I don’t see what Ebay can really do to stop Craigslist. If they attempt, or succeed at, some kind of takeover/makeover, Greg will start Gregslist. Ad nauseum.
I know two guys who bought cars on Ebay and were very disappointed. They were both Mustangs. One was a 1960’s model and the photos put on Ebay were outdated by many years. The other was a newish model convertable that turned out to have structural damage. And the top leaked.
My own experience was one of identity theft. Someone in Miami opened a “company” in my name and started purchasing items on Ebay on my credit card and having them shiped to FL. (I live in another state) Ebay was no help at all. I could never get any customer service. My credit card company was great (Discover)and promptly shut the card down and the charges were reversed.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=140438252031&viewitem=&sspagename=STRK:MEWNX:IT#ht_1787wt_1161
I was the “winner” of this eBay auction.
What I bought was a 4-owner, stolen, damaged, auctioned-by-the-insurance-company-because-the-1st-owner-didn’t-want-it-back-vehicle.
eBay’s “Gilbert” in response tells me that eBay won’t honor their promise against fraudulent misrepresentation/stolen vehicle/etc because my Department of Motor Vehicles has only “discouraged” me from titling the car.
Gilbert? eBay’s service department is a real-live Dilbert cartoon.
Hello?
The thieves pried off all the VIN plates.
Replacement identification numbers were not properly notified with the California Department of Motor Vehicles, and my local sheriff was doing his job by refusing to approve the title.
I was lucky that the sheriff was in a good mood and didn’t arrest me for a previous owner’s negligence in reporting an A-class felony.
I paid for a 1 owner mint 300SD.
Instead, I get smoke and mirrors.