This suit may require some mind-clearing for some to grasp, and admittedly the “proxy bidding” angle is ingenious. The essence: eBay does not claim to be an auctioneer. It does not have an auctioneer’s license. In fact, its legal claim as a hands-off “online bulletin board” that merely “facilitates” auctions has allowed them to circumvent various regulations, including the Internet Communications Act. This has been the biggest elephant in one room of a house of cards for more than a decade, and eBay has thumbed their nose at the lagging legal system while inventing and cornering a huge market share. PayPal shenanigans, facilitating libel via feedback, acting as an arbitrator/return center with sellers’ funds… and David’s “proxy bid” case comes along with a slingshot. We’ll see if anyone pays attention to his aim.

That is ridiculously stupid. If the guy has a problem with their proxy bidding system, he can go somewhere else to sell his stuff.

We have a bunch of whiny crybabies for citizens these days.

Anyway, as far as SAVING/BUYING $ and eBay goes:

If you send the seller a question about an item, find another of their listings, and send the question from that item page, rather than from the one that you actually want. This will add a little bit of work for the seller, if they want to add your question and their answer to the item description page that you are actually interested in.

If you see an item that you want listed in auction format, send the seller a message asking if they will accept $x to end the auction early and sell the item to you. May be telling them that they would not have to wait as long to get their money (they would probably know that, but it still might help). If that does not work, use a sniping service such as Bidball.com to bid for you. It’ll bid in the last few seconds, helping you to save money and avoid shill bidding.

Use a site like Ebuyersedge.com to set up saved searches. You’d get an e-mail whenever a match is listed. Especially good for “Buy It Now”s that are priced right.

If the item that you are looking for is a long word or a bit difficult to spell, try a misspelling search site like Typojoe.com to hopefully find some deals with items that have main keywords misspelled in the title. Other interested buyers might not ever see them. Then, if the item is listed an auction format, after a few days of no bids (hopefully anyway) send the seller and offer to end the auction early and sell the item to you. After a few days of no bids, they may worry that no one is interested, and take whatever they can get.