Why do some sellers hide their bidders on EBay?

Maybe there is a good reason for doing this but I am becoming suspicious of sellers who hide details on all bidders on an EBay item.
I decided recently never to buy from sellers who hide their bidders until I uncovered a legitimate reason for doing this. Maybe somebody can enlighten me as to a legitimate reason. I'm really interested in the answer.

 

I thought eBay themselves hid bidders details on all auctions in the last several years.

I figured it was so one bidder couldn't contact another bidder etc...I used to occasionally warn bidders that they were bidding on a counterfeit "Introducing The Beatles" LP etc...can't anymore. Do you have any links to auctions that don't hide details? I can't find any.

 

Normally you get a version of the buyer name like i***f and the feedback score of the bidder. I am fine with this. But when a seller hides these details, you get nothing but the word Private after every bid. This is the scenario that I have concerns about.

 

Ah, I see...I think I did see that once on an extremely rare item. So you don't even get to see the amount of the bids then?

 

Having the IDs private helps if the seller wanted to engage in shill bidding, yes.

 

It does help you facilitate shill bidding, but what I am looking for is a legitimate (honest) reason why a seller might do this for an LP/CD/SACD.

 

I do this on my auctions, as once I had a - the highest - bidder on one of my auctions cancel his bid, and his reason was (when I pressed him), that someone had contacted him via that page and offered him their copy at a lesser price than he was already bidding at.

Saved them listing their item! but pissed me off no end.

 

How could he be contacted? Isn't that why ebay hides the real names now? How was that even possible in your case?

 

back when the IDs were listed it was pretty common to be contacted by another seller with the same item...sometimes offering to sell outside of eBay which was the real problem...eBay wasn't getting their cut and sometimes the buyer would be ripped off.

 

I can't think of any legitimate reason for the use of private bids now. The only thing that comes to mind is a seller that might sell x-rated items and also sell family oriented items and want to keep that aspect of feedback unavailable or unclear to bidders on the family items. One thing I often see is sellers of bootlegs will use private bidders only. This seller has been getting away with it often for a year, he sells bootleg box sets and gets great feedback, all of it private but once in a while a knowledgeable buyer is caught and points out what he has purchased and gets a refund.

http://cgi.ebay.com/Doors-Perceptio...674293794?pt=AU_Audio_CDs&hash=item41597dd822

 

IHMO
If Seller has hide full nick he can't sell nothing.
Buyer can have hidden nick, no problem.

 

It's fairly recent (4 years?) that eBay changed policy to prevent members not in a transaction from contacting each other. Before then it was fair game to message other bidders for any reason.

Private auctions (no bidder names at all) were an early feature to prevent interference with the bidders, and to allow 'well known' bidders to remain anonymous. This is a big deal in many collectible markets, where crazy personal rivalries exist.

Now everybody's anonymous, you have to act accordingly. Some things lost, some gained. I really appreciated being able to snoop on others' buying patterns and how much they paid in the past for things to form a strategy to beat them. can't do that now.

 

They also change things up. For example, eBay seller 'iloveaudio' may be 'v***d' one week, then sometime later be identified as 'o***a'.

This does ruin the fun of bidding against a common foe!

However, you can use feedback to back track and find out who is who. You just have to know the buying patterns of someone and what types of items they bid on. In the "List all feedback" of a seller, the full names are listed.

So, if 'h***d' wins a rare LP, wait a week or so, go to the sellers feedback, then look for feedback on the item. There, it will say that the winning bidder was 'ghostrider'.

Thus 'h***d' = 'ghostrider'!

 

oh, wow. Forgot all about that aspect. I used to do the same thing occasionally. Sort of a fun little gamesmanship challenge.

 

Hm...

So far I've never buy nothing from seller with hidden/private feedback, but I sold a few albums to buyers with hidden details with no problems at all.

Some people (if we talking about eBay) are collectors and they don't want to share what they buying. I remember reading explanation from buyer about hidden feedback on his page "When I go out shopping, do I look into your basket?".

Well...Some people cheating, some not. You never know, you can have suspicions to wrong person.