[meteorite-list] MIR part vanished fast!

From: Sharkkb8_at_aol.com <Sharkkb8_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 09:44:42 2004
Message-ID: <15.11a01dff.27eebd43_at_aol.com>

 
<< Recently someone sold their soul on Ebay, those of us that make a living
using Ebay can not afford that kind of stuff.>>

Someone who notices a frivolous auction will assume YOUR auction is equally
stupid? Seems odd.

You seem to have a startlingly low opinion of people, assuming that they (1)
can't distinguish real-from-fake or serious-from-humor with any degree of
success, and (2) that they will sell (and buy) fraudulent items in such
staggeringly high numbers that the whole operation will fall. Swap meets and
flea markets have at least as high a percentage of bad stuff, but no one
seems to want to close them down, or have "auction police", or have
experts-on-absolutely-everything on the premises, issuing guarantees of
authenticity. Ebay has several million new items offered every single day
- just as a matter of practicality, how would you propose that each and
every item be examined and certified by an expert, before it would be allowed
to be sold? That's a lot of airfare, hotel rooms, and rental cars to ask a
company to provide, to its hundreds-of-thousands of roving, high-priced
expert authenticators.

<< If people do not take it seriously when you tell them that you can move
something on Ebay, because they think it is NOT a credible marketplace, due
to Fraud. >>

Maybe the people who don't like or trust ebay should just not use it. Not a
terribly radical solution, is it? I've been involved in exactly 275 ebay
transactions, and have had ONE problem with an auction, a buyer who backed
out of the deal. All the items I sold (and bought) were genuine, so that
means there 275 routinely-completed transactions, involving genuine items,
sold-or-bought by 275 satisfied people, with ONE bump in the road. I'll
happily take that ratio, thank you very much. Ask the question of
established dealers: is 275-1 a bad transaction-percentage, in
customer/dealer satisfaction? It's the old half-full-half-empty glass
analogy - some people seem determined to define ebay by the occasional
fraudulent auction, most prefer to define it by the millions and millions and
millions of non-newsworthy transactions and happy buyers/sellers. But they
don't get as much attention as a wad of duct-tape jokingly called Mir, so
everybody concentrates on the "1" instead of the "275". Such is life, I
guess.

Gregory

 
Received on Sat 24 Mar 2001 10:17:23 PM PST