I don’t use eBay over-much. However, despite the costs involved, it is a useful way of offloading old vehicles. And so, finally, it was time to part with our much loved workhorse – the Renault Scenic that was a second home for me during our French sojourn. Having racked up over 122,000 miles and succumbing to the lure of automatic transmission, it was time to bid farewell to the old faithful. So an eBay auction was arranged as trading it in was tantamount to giving it away.
And then followed the usual eBay nonsense: Questions.
Sure, I have no problem with people asking questions, but when the answer is in the description, I become a mite irritable, as I do when the question is downright stupid – such as the person who, contemplating my TR1, asked how could she convert it into a trike? How the fuck should I know? Besides, I wouldn’t enable such vandalism of a perfectly sound specimen anyway.
Then, of course, there are those who want to have a look before bidding. This, too, I understand as I wouldn’t buy sight unseen. However, I know this will be a waste of time. Not once, in all of the auctions I have run, has a looker ever bid. Once, I managed to get an example of both phenomena in one package – the gentleman came to look at the TR1, and decided that it wasn’t what he wanted as he was hoping to ride it away. This, despite the description stating very clearly that the bike needed work before it could be ridden and that it was SORNed for this very reason.
It seems to be a truism of the process. So, when the questions come in; “can I come and look?” I know damned well that my time is about to be wasted. The worst example was the gentleman who seemed to spend his Sunday mornings looking at bikes. He came to see my BMW R1150RT with absolutely no interest in buying, it was just a Sunday morning jaunt for him. What pisses me off about these people is the assumption that my time is theirs to waste – and, because I am polite, and because I have to consider the possibility that they are genuine, I fall for it every time.
Thus it was with the Scenic. Yup, he came, he saw, he wasted my time. And, no, he didn’t bid, despite assuring us that he would (they nearly always do). Why, is anybody’s guess. The car was as described and the price it eventually went for was fair. So what is it with these people? I will never understand…
Fortunately, I have no immediate plans to sell anything in the near future.
I buy and sell all my vehicles (and that’s a lot) on ebay. There’s something about motor vehicles that brings out idiots that no other item would do and Ive yet to find a reason for it.
Ive started adding a caveat to my listings that the winning bidder is to pay for the car and take it away with no other interaction. I’ve grown tired of winners coming to collect and still wanting to take the damn thing for a test drive or go over it with a fine tooth comb. I don’t mind pre inspections (never happened), but once the car has been won I see no reason to hang around and waste my time. It’s theirs, they do do whatever they want with it in their own time.
I’ve rarely had a normal item go un paid for by the winner yet I’ve had lots of people win a car and then fuck off, never to be heard from again and it’s always people with no feedback who seem to have created an account simply to piss somebody off.
Ive never understood it.
I’ll hazard a guess that most of the timewasters are men, they buy the car in a fit of stupidity then the wife finds out, hates the look of it, and stops the purchase.
Many of the rest are teenage idiots who haven’t ever bothered to find out what insurance costs.
But you are correct in your observation, I have never had any probolems with ebay buyers or sellers except for cars, and even before the ebay era selling a car was often a nightmare.
To be fair to eBay, this kind of thing is common to any kind of private sales transaction going back to the time when it was done through the small ads in the newspapers. Talking of small ads, there was once an ad in the Hull Daily Mail for a 50cc Mope Head.