Question about ebay

[Darryl Hattenhauer]

It's against ebay rules for a buyer to ask a seller to end an auction early, right?

(bOb: apologies if you need to move this.)

[Mark van Allen]

People do it all the time. Ebay's mostly just afraid of missing out on their cut somehow. A lot of sellers respond nicely to requests for off-ebay action.
You aren't protected by ebay buyer protections, but if the seller has a high feedback rating, I wouldn't worry about dealing with them via email.

[Darryl Hattenhauer]

Mark,

It's definitely against ebay rules to make a deal off ebay and avoid giving them their cut. But if a seller offers $100 to end it early, and the buyer agrees, can they do that and still give ebay their cut?

dh

[Remi Villeneuve]

Hi

A lot of time, when there's a "real" store behind the eBay account they kind of suggest it to you...

Many times I asked questions about stuff on eBay and had replies from the "store" guy suggesting "if you really wanna buy that guitar... let's do it off ebay and so on...."

Lots of store are using eBay account as advertising media. In that case, there is no worry about the buyer protection. If you pay by Paypal, you will at least have their protection if something goes wrong.

My 2 cents....

[Mike Davidson]

It's never against the rules to 'ask' a seller to end early. It is against the rules to transact outside of ebay. A couple of criteria too. If there are bids it must be sold to high bidder. So someone would have to make sure they are high bidder and then you can tickbox 'ended auction to sell to high bidder'. You also can't end early in the last 24 hours.

Never really seen it be a good deal for the seller. Most of the time people want to end early when they think they're going to get beat.

[Darryl Hattenhauer]

Thanks, guys.

This explains why some sellers actually encourage a buyer to request an early sale, while others react as if the buyer is asking for something that would get the seller kicked off ebay. In reality, making an offer to end early can't hurt (unless you offer more than what it would have sold for).

It also shows that the buyer is probably better off making his offer to end it early before any other bids are made.

[Alan Miller]

Ive had low offers from ebay buyers for items and rejected them on the grounds I have ebay and paypal fees .
The buyer then says he will pick it up from you and pay cash in hand saving the fees and postage.
If there have been no bids or other definite best offers ............

[Jim Cohen]

If you hunt around eBay you can find the Info for Sellers, which describes exactly when it is or isn't kosher to end an auction early. They do have several ways that that can be done legitimately.

[John Kally]

Hi Darryl,
A good, ebay-approved, way to do this is to ask if the seller will do a "buy it now" at some price. This can be managed by the seller within the ebay confines, they still get their money for the sale and no breach of rules, etc. I further recommend that if you do this you actually say how much you want to pay since lots of people will send out emails asking "how much will you do a buy-it-now for" without any kind of figure mentioned. I can understand sellers wanting to work out deals outside of ebay (which I hear people refer to as "fee-bay" since those can really add up and then using that other ebay company, paypal for even more fees). In my own experience when people offer me a price to end an auction early, most times it actually sells for more than that amount when I run the auction run it's course, but not always. Hope this helps. Good to see you yesterday.