2002-11-04 - 11:22 p.m.

Ebay Follies

Bad habits, I pick them up like lint.

A couple weeks ago I was wondering, in my chess-history-induced frenzy, if I was missing something by not checking eBay regularly for auctioned chess items. I really didn't think I was missing that much since chess is so out of the mainstream of American culture. So I surfed on over and did a couple searches.

I was wrong, wrong, wrong. There are buckets of chess stuff, some if it quite rare and interesting. Who knew?

It's been forever since I actually did anything with eBay. I couldn't remember my old password, and I couldn't find out what it was since it was tied to my old dial-up email address. So I get to be an eBay newbie again, starting with no feedback. Woo.

When one is first playing with a potentially addictive thing like eBay there is this phenomenon that always happens which I like to call "the first one's free" syndrome. I won my first auction pretty easily, and got some old chess magazines pretty cheaply. I thought: "hey, this is easy."

However, of my next four auctions I only won two, and the items I picked up weren't nearly so cheap. I noticed an annoying phenomenon: in the last five minutes of the auction, the prices would shoot up dramatically. This meant that people were sitting by their computers, updating the bid screen every three seconds, waiting to pounce as the items neared their deadline.

Hey, no fair! That's what *I* was doing! You're stealing my thunder!

Also, I've been carried away by "auction frenzy" a couple of times, getting into an intense bidding war with someone while the price of the object spirals out of control. Recently I watched in horror as a piece of chess software I was interested in that supposedly retails for $20 sprinted past $100 in frantic last-minute bidding. Holy cats!

There seem to be about six to ten people bidding on these ancient chess magazines, and to my surprise I discover that I recognize many of them from their eBay names. For example, one of the bidders is the postal chess columnist for Chess Life. But then again, you can probably tell who I am through my ID. Hint: it's a variation of my real name not "Mr. Hamster" or anything like that.

Us chess guys: not exactly icons of subtlety.

It's funny I should be getting into eBay again, because just a couple of weeks ago I was reading an article talking about widespread fraud there and how the administrators of eBay are not doing much about it. However, a lot of what it comes down to is: if you think the item is too expensive: don't bid on it!

I must admit that I love looking at people's feedback and reading the negative messages. What a gossip I am!

Anyway, there is a certain sort of Wild-West-anything-goes ambiance to eBay that's kind of interesting. I'll give two examples of this before I continue on my merry way.

Like I said before, I'm looking for chess items, specifically items dealing with chess history. This is kind of a specialized interest, and the sellers of goods don't make it easy to find what I'm looking for. You'd think that someone selling a book that is a collection of some issues of a chess magazine would have the words "chess" "book" and "magazine" in the description of the item, but that would make life too simple.

I was searching for just the word "chess" and got a huge number of hits, over 100 pages worth. One thing I was struck by while scrolling through all the entries, was how many people were trying to sell chess sets made out of glass, like the one that Professor X and Magneto used in the X-Men movie. There are literally hundreds of them. If you want one, there's no reason why you should pay more than $3.99. Someone plainly overproduced these things and now is using eBay to dump them.

The other example is a bit sleazier. Someone is "selling" email lists of addresses to send spam to over eBay. While this is dodgy enough in its own right, they are adding an extra level of sleaze to it by putting key words in the description so it will pop up on a lot of searches. For example: "Digital Camera email list make $$$ at home," is not about digital cameras at all. In fact these auctions don't seem to be about anything but advertising their product, which they are doing for free since if you don't sell your "item," you don't have to pay eBay.

Well, in spite of all the caveats, I haven't been burned yet! If I do, you know I'll start bitching about it here.