eBay and the 1 cent buy it now listing.

The 1 cent buy it now listing was one of my biggest pet peeves on eBay, and while it was finally something that was stopped, it took far too long to do so.

These listings were cesspools of fraud. I think it took 10 feedback to qualify to sell with a buy it now price. So a fraudster would create a new account and quickly buy 10 of these listings, for recipes, pictures, etc.

They would then list a pile of items for sale at buy it now prices, items they didn't have, and hopefully in the time it took for it to become apparent that they were a fraud, they'd get one or more people suckered in to sending them money. Most of the listings would direct potential buyers to contact them directly, and pay with Western Union.

If one of these 1c buy it now listings had been active for any amount of time on the site, a quick look at the bidders would show that 50% or more of them had since been suspended, and inevitably that suspension was for fraud.

Sellers whose feedback was poor would sell these items in an effort to keep their feedback high enough to stay on the site. And, as discussed earlier, employees of eBay would use these listings to build their own feedback high enough to qualify for a free trip to eBay live.

Keep in mind as well that feedback abuse such as this was always against eBay policy.

So, to anyone with common sense, these listings were bad for eBay. They created a lot of extra work for customer support, but far more importantly they created a lot of bad feeling amongst those people who were ripped off.

Now, you would think that this would be obvious, and that having these listings banned permanently would be a logical outcome. Yet, despite the best efforts of Brian Burke, and despite the efforts of some reps like myself who took it upon ourselves to police these listings, the Business Unit wouldn't permit them to be banned. See, they only took into consideration the income from those listings, and they decided that there was enough income from the listings that banning them would be bad for business. It took YEARS, and I mean YEARS, before anyone could break through this wall of idiocy to explain the negative aspects and the amount of man hours that went into working on these issues.

Eventually these listings were banned, but not before they did an amazing amount of damage to eBay's repuation. And not to forget, they did a lot of damage to eBay member's wallets.