New eBay bidder listing format

[rkawakami]

Keeping eBay your trusted source for great deals and truly unique finds is important to all of us. Toward this end, we're making an important change:

Soon we will no longer display the complete user IDs of people bidding on any auction-style listing. Instead, we'll use asterisks such as x***y to protect our members' identities. Sellers will continue to see complete user IDs on their listings and the winning bidder's ID will be visible to everyone after the auction ends.

We haven't provided this information on listings of $200 or higher for some time and it's been a very effective fraud deterrent for those items. For safety reasons, we're now expanding this protection to all auction-style listings.

We know many of you like to see who you're bidding against. But displaying this information makes it too easy for scammers to send out fake offers that include convincing details of your actual bidding activity on a specific listing, such as the item number, description and exact amount you bid.

In recent weeks fraudulent email offers targeting listings under $200 has surged unacceptably. To keep eBay a top shopping destination we must choose safety over visibility and nip this in the bud. We recognize for some of you this may be an unwelcome limitation but we hope you'll support our putting more muscle into fraud prevention.

[al7kz]

That's great! Thanks Ray.

a***z

[rkawakami]

Hmm.... I thought I put in a sentence before the quote... anyway it was basically that I got this message in my eBay inbox and it was being posted as a FYI.

It confirms one thing that I noticed in the last several weeks: if the high bidder ID was displayed as x***y, I knew that they had bid more than $200 on the item. Now, everybody's ID is showing up hidden like this. The one bad thing about this system is that I can't search the high bidder's previous history to see how much they bid before on a similar item. Sure it may help reduce the fraudulent offers being sent out but if people would be more careful in what emails they open up and respond to, then everybody wouldn't have to suffer <shrug> . Another bad thing is that it's going to be harder to determine if there is a shill bidder pushing up the price. Now, you are not going to be able to see if a seller has a certain "buyer" that's always bidding on their auctions.

One other thing that I noticed: the "x***y" appears to be randomly generated and NOT actually the first and last character of the bidder's ID. I saw two listings that I was tracking prior to crossing the $200 threshold and I'm sure that both had totally different names before and after. I've just confirmed this with a randomly selected 256MB SODIMM listing. The bidder's ID was "i***i" 3 seconds before ending and it changed to "pho...x" after the auction closed.

Also, as mentioned in the eBay message, I had received two fake "Second Chance" offers within the last week from auctions which ended at less then $200. One of them was when I was third or fourth highest bidder and the other one was sent out before the auction ended . How did I end up getting those fake offers? I plead "guilty" to having an email address (actually TWO) the same as my eBay ID .

[bill bolton]

Soon we will no longer display the complete user IDs of people bidding on any auction-style listing. Instead, we'll use asterisks such as x***y to protect our members' identities. Sellers will continue to see complete user IDs on their listings and the winning bidder's ID will be visible to everyone after the auction ends.

eBay in Australia recently started to suppress bidder's names entirely, just showing "bidder 1", "bidder 2" in the bid list to other bidders (I don't know what the seller sees). At the end of the auction, the eventual successful high bidder (if there is one) does have their full eBay User ID shown to everyone, but none of the other bidders IDs are shown.

US eBay

Bidder Bid Amount Bid Time

o***p (435) US $45.00 05-Mar-08 12:13:49 AEDST


e***l (384) US $44.00 05-Mar-08 12:08:45 AEDST


o***p (435) US $40.00 05-Mar-08 12:13:37 AEDST


o***p (435) US $35.00 05-Mar-08 12:13:26 AEDST


k***a (437) US $32.85 04-Mar-08 15:16:57 AEDST


e***l (384) US $31.00 03-Mar-08 06:50:05 AEDST


o***p (435) US $30.00 04-Mar-08 13:05:59 AEDST


o***p (435) US $25.00 04-Mar-08 12:46:57 AEDST


o***p (435) US $20.00 04-Mar-08 12:46:48 AEDST


u***c (879) US $11.99 02-Mar-08 16:32:24 AEDST


Oz eBay

Bidder Bid Amount Bid Time

Bidder 2 AU $12.50 04-Mar-08 18:56:00 AEDST


Bidder 3 AU $12.00 06-Mar-08 02:09:41 AEDST


Bidder 3 AU $11.00 05-Mar-08 05:43:39 AEDST


Bidder 1 AU $10.00 01-Mar-08 21:48:18 AEDST



Cheers,

Bill B.