[Baxthorpe]

I have reported schill bidding to eBay.

I first encountered it between members of a family living in Torquay by the name of Burch - yea, I was sold a piece of broken doodah for a fiver, and because it was less than £15 eBay would do nothing, neither would the seller, and that was why I got interested. I have seen one family member offer the same fishing reel for sale three times - the first two times it did not get high enough, and was bought by a relative down the road. Of course there's more ...

I know of a "member" who has bid on and bought many items over the years from a particular vendor - and got absolutely no feedback from him, even though he has officially spent thousands of dollars.

Report your blatant schill bidders to eBay. They will send you a comforting email, and otherwise ignore them.

Another thing you can't do is to report misrepresentation in a listing. If the listing contains blatant lies, there is no pre-set category in the report system. When you try to tell eBay about a lie in a listing, you have to use another category - then they ask you to go back and select the correct category for your complaint. If you try to complain that there is no category available, they again ask you to go back and select the correct category for your complaint. If you try to suggest that they add a category, they tell you that they do not accept suggestions except from their own staff. Then, if you enquire why they ask for suggestions, they get more concilatory - but they do nothing about the problem.

eBay people have a peculiar management strategy - if they do not like something, they do something about it. If that "something" is annoying messages from customers, they send palliative messages to the customers - but they do naff all about any problems, unless there is a procedure already in place to deal with those problems. This reflects a common situation in EuroManagement - ideas have to appear from above, and work down through the organisation, before they are taken seriously.

Methinks it is significant that eBay has recently moved its corporate registration, and Paypal's corporate registration, to Luxembourg. I would bet that Paypal has not moved its servers from the US (where they were located to avoid the UK Data Protection Act). It is obvious that the corporate relocations are a blatant removal from countries with strong litigation against corporate entities, to about the weakest anti-corporate legal system in the EU - if they were being really shifty, Lithuania would have been a good bet, but their employees would have trouble with the weather and the language.

Trying to complain about the eBay system is just like trying to complain about Microsoft software - by the time something "legal" can be done about a complaint, the complainant will be bankrupt, dead, or just plain tired of fighting. You use it because it is the easiest route to your goals, and join the grumblers when it will not do what you want. Keep plugging, Phil, but keep your expectations low.