Pretty WickedPretty MagicalHarry Potter FandomHarry Potter StuffHarry Potter Book QuoteHarry Potter GiftHarry Potter DrawingGeeky FandomHarry Potter ClothesForwardLooking for a new phone case for your new iPhone? These Harry Potter cases are pretty wicked!Error 404: HTTP Page Not Found The content you requested could not be found, and we don’t know why. Thomas the kitten offers a gentle apology, and promises to be a better webmaster with your help. If you wish to report the offending link, or express outrage for this error, please contact us with details. Remember to be gentle, since Thomas is only a kitten after all. You may search our contents, or return to the home page. Only you can decide this fate, so choose wisely. Gibberish to follow below, for test scripts:David Brackin is the co-founder of Stuff U Sell and has sold over 150,000 different items on eBay. He is also a regular contributor to Tamebay. Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, famously said:

“Most people are honest. And they mean well … But some people are dishonest. It’s a fact of life. But here, those people can’t hide.” We think he’s right — we’ve heard many stories of dishonesty published in the media, but overwhelmingly our experience of both buyers and sellers on eBay is that most people are honest and decent, and will go out of their way to make something right for another person. However, over the past year, we’ve also seen a sharp increase in both the level and sophistication of buyer frauds. These aren’t the payments frauds of days gone by but are focused on returns. With the latest proposal to hold sellers to account for returns levels over 2%, for them, it is no longer about whether most buyers are honest, but nearly all. In my business, the simplest fraud we’ve seen is simply to claim a warehouse mistake happened and the wrong item was sent out. In one particular instance the buyer said she received a £10 dress instead of a £400 Vivienne Westwood Jacket.

Sadly she didn’t tell her Mum who answered the phone and confirmed that she had the jacket and confirmed the warehouse stock code on it. However, eBay only considers communications via its Resolution Centre so the refund was made when the dress was sent back and the case is currently with the Greater Manchester Police. Another a common fraud is “wear & return”, which retailers try to prevent by attaching large uncomfortable labels to garments. However, it only costs £15 to buy a tagging gun and enough tags to keep you in fresh clothes each weekend for a year.fidlar hoodie We uncovered a particularly nasty case of this when a buyer put the tag back on a pair of high street jeans and returned them instead of the designer ones she had bought. assassin's creed iii hoodie czMost of the time you at least get the same item back — even if it does have a bus ticket and an empty packet of cigarettes in the pocket.north face masonic hoodie on sale

The most convoluted fraud that we’ve come across is a “nearby address” fraud. In this, the buyer deliberately sends the return to a nearby address (for example unit 44 instead of 14,) where someone signs for the item and is bemused to find an old catalogue being sent Special Delivery. The tracking shows it as properly delivered from the right Royal Mail sorting office to the right postcode and with a signature so eBay process the return. It’s very, very hard to investigate, although your Royal Mail account manager might be able to dig out the original till receipt if it was sent from a Post Office.gude hoodie So why the increase in fraud? bape shark hoodie euMaybe this is just part of Austerity Britain. check meowt hoodieMaybe it’s because eBay has had to focus on protecting buyers from bad sellers to fix its reputation.

Perhaps users are starting to think of eBay as a faceless system with rules to get around rather than Pierre’s vision of people trading with people. We think that eBay needs to become a lot more flexible in the way in which it handles refunds and returns and put in the same level of personal service and attention to detail that the very best buyers and sellers do. Simply engineering a one-size-fits-all solution is no longer good enough. The pain that sellers experience with returns fraud is much more than the financial loss: often it’s their good standing with the marketplace that is at risk and the time and trouble that they have to go to get customer services to understand and address the problem. Calls of up to an hour are not uncommon. What do you think? Have you seen more returns fraud and cunning ruses to get round the rules? What should eBay be doing to make the marketplace safer?The requested URL /C/letters/blog.pl?/pl/2010/10/1285937801.html was not found on this server.

Al Gore Comes Out Against SOPA/PIPA >> << Righthaven Fails To Show Up In Court As... Mike MasnickFri, Jan 6th 2012 6:07am auctions, automatic bidding, business models, class action Class Action Lawsuit Filed Against eBay Because Of The Way Its Auctions Workfrom the oh-come-on dept It seems you can find people to file a class action lawsuit against just about any crazy thing these days. The latest, as pointed out by Eric Goldman (with the complaint embedded below), is someone filing a class action lawsuit against eBay claiming all sorts of violations for the way eBay's auction system has always worked. Here's the basic issue. eBay developed a rather clever system back when it launched to handle bidding. You don't just put in your next bid -- you put in what's supposed to be the maximum you're willing to bid on an item. But the auction system itself always goes for the highest bidder's lowest increment above the second highest bidder. If that sounds confusing, let's take the language from eBay's own site, and quoted in the lawsuit:

The current bid for an item is $10.00. Tom is the high bidder, and has placed a maximum bid of $12.00 on the item. His maximum bid is kept confidential from other members. Laura views the item and places a maximum bid of $15.00. Laura becomes the high bidder. Tom�s bid is incremented to his maximum of $12.00. Laura�s bid is now $12.50. We send Tom an email that he has been outbid. If he doesn�t raise his maximum bid, Laura wins the item. This is how eBay has always worked. And it's a perfectly reasonable business model choice that eBay did because it makes life much more convenient for users. Rather than having to put in place each bid, you can set the most you're willing to pay and rest assured that you'll just have to pay the next increment above the second highest bid. Of course, in practice, the bidding rarely works that way, with people often feeling pressure to raise their highest bid, or wait until the very end to snipe the bid. But, overall what could possibly be the problem with this system?

Well, according to the lawsuit, this all seems to be a conspiracy to defraud the seller of the full $15 that Laura bid. The fact that she only pays $12.50 is apparently due to eBay failing to "act neutrally" and instead "inject[ing] itself into the transaction by intercepting the bid aamount [sic] before it is received by the seller." Once again, this is how eBay has worked forever, and it's pretty clearly explained on the site. It's a business model choice that makes plenty of sense. It's not some breach of contract, or "tortious interference" or "unfair competition" or "unjust enrichment." It's just a business model. In fact, if eBay were really being nefarious, wouldn't it set things up the other way? After all, since eBay gets fees as a percentage of the sale price, if the company were really being sneaky, it would try to force everyone to pay the higher bid. If anything, it seems like eBay's structure is designed to help people, not to unjustly enrich itself... Barrett Brown's Donors Sue DOJ/FBI For Monitoring Their Donations