Losing Out After Winning an Online Auction

I’VE ventured into the world of online auctions only about a half-dozen times, so I’m pretty much an amateur. But it has been mostly a successful experience: I felt the thrill of outbidding and winning, and my items arrived on time and in good shape.

I had a few problems — a desk I won never arrived and my inquiring e-mail messages were never answered. But since I had paid by credit card, I challenged the payment and lost no money in the end.

The second time, my husband and I actually sold a tea set on eBay, but then I did something really stupid — it was so expensive to send to California by United Parcel Service that I shipped it via the Postal Service without requesting delivery notification. The buyer claimed he never got it, it was never returned and so someone, somewhere, is enjoying their tea with a lovely — and free — English silver-plated tea set.

Lesson learned.

I recently checked back into the world of online auctions, and was overwhelmed by the number of choices. Besides the behemoth eBay, there are hundreds of others: general ones like auctions.overstock.com, eBid.net, CQout.com and uBid.com, as well as specialized ones like WineBid.com, LabX.com (for lab and medical equipment), JustBeads.com. Sedo.com (for domain names) and Bid4Assets.com for big-ticket items like real estate.

But as you may have suspected, with the great deals, you can also find yourself taking on something you didn’t bid on — a big headache.

Read more . . .

*Disclaimer: Innovation Toronto is working on an online auction process that will remove most if not all of the problem areas mentioned in this article.  The site is scheduled to go live in March 2010.

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• Postal strikes leave eBay users in limbo (guardian.co.uk)
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Tags: auction, auctions, CNN, ebay, ebay profits, ebay users, online auction, online auctions, travel market, ubid

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 24th, 2009 at 9:52 am and is filed under Consider This, FYI, Innovation Needed. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.