Buyer beware

A couple of years ago, I was looking to buy a Palm Tungsten PDA. I decided to look at Ebay. I found a deal that looked pretty good, but being a little concerned by the whole thing of 'if it looks too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true', I decided to check out the buyer a bit more. Chinese; okay that might explain the price (or not). Good ratings, so who from? Other Chinese buyers. Hmmm, well okay. Check a bit more and find ... these seem to be a mini cartel buying stuff from each other and giving each other great ratings (I mean, too good, really). So I decided not to risk it and also reported it as a potential scam to Ebay. So interesting to find someone's done a study and found the same.

common on eBay... more than 6,000 examples of buyers and sellers engaging in transactions solely to boost one another’s scores. These auctions frequently had titles like “100+ Feedback” and a price of 1 cent. Often, the item for trade was a booklet explaining how to increase feedback by reselling that same booklet.

Worth looking at some of the other things going on. It's a jungle out there.

Technorati Tags: Ebay, research, scams, buying, selling, ratings, wisdom_of_crowds