Change in E-bay bidder identification

[Phil Waterman]

I just noted that e-bay has changed how it displays bidder information.

"As the internet evolves, eBay continues to strike a balance between preserving transparency and protecting our Community of members. eBay has decided to change how bid history information is displayed so bad guys cannot target bidders with fake offers using this information. In certain cases, some bidders will no longer be able to view Bidder User IDs on the Bid History page. Your User ID will be shown only to you and the seller of the item you're bidding on. Other members will see an anonymous name, such as Bidder 1, applied consistently to the Bid History page."

While I understand and applaud there efforts to protect bidders and get sellers the best price, some thought of how the small CMP community can avoided unnecessarily bidding items above their real value particularly if other wise we would just as soon let another member the CMP Community have the item. This is of particular importance on items that can be shared such as photos.

Your thoughts?

By the way the item that brought this to my attention was the Ford CMP in West Virginia http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/1938-...QQcmdZViewItem

[horsa]

Played around with some listings to see if I could find a trend to the change. From what I found, regular eBay listings and eBay Motors listing for small merchandise still behave like they always have when checking bidders.

It appears that the bidders identity is blocked now on eBay Motors actual vehicle listings. Might be other big ticket items as well and it would likely spread to the rest of eBay if they get positive feedback from the feature.

There is also a floating text that will appear when you hover the mouse over the individual bidder details and this shows approximately how long the bidder has been registered and a range of how many things they have bid on for various times so you can tell if they are at least a real person or a newly created account or one that only bids things up but never wins anything.

[rob love]

Hopefully that will cut down on the scammer's second chance offers. A while back I got 3 second chance offers for the same #32 Enfield sniper telescope. It's amazing how you can string these guys along, all the whilst reducing your offer, when you know, and they know, that you will never get anything from them. But as long as they smell money, they will keep replying. The hard thing for them to do is to send a fresh photo of the item in question.

It will be a loss though to not be able to properly evaluate the competition.