Digital lifestyle - Entertainment and recreation

Scam of the online auction

Online auction is one of the popular shopping method of people nowadays. It is the digital technology that hold an auction on a internet. Both buyers and seller can benefit with the online auction. For sellers, they can sell their merchandise with low cost, as they can reduce some fixed cost such as rent. For buyers, they have lots of opportunity can buy a cheap product in online auction. For example, they compete with other buyers in one dollar bid. Also, it is more convenient to shop any goods worldwide, such as using e-bay. There are lots of advantages in online auction, but whey many digital immigrants, even digital native keeps to shop in real world store? Auction scams may be the most obvious reason.

Although the auction website establish some of the strategy to defend, for instance, e-bay set up a ‘customer support’, to help e-bay user report their problem about the auction, and provide lots of guides for them, buyers cannot avoid all the scam in the online auction. Shill bidding is the typical auction fraud in the online auction. It is a strategy of seller that employ someone seek to provoke a bidding war among other participants, driving prices up with phony bids (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shill_bidding#Auctions). Buyers may pay a higher price to win the bid. In my opinion, shill bidding usually exist in ($1 bid), or selling vary product. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71j6ZDx4j-g).  
There have some way to identify a Shill Bidder on eBay in this link, it can be as soon as possible to avoid shill bidding. However, shill bidder will not care their account of the auction website, they can create more and more account. For example, in e-bay, the account information is related to Paypal, but we cannot prevent they provide a faking information in applying Paypal. Therefore, buyers cannot defend the shill bidding happening eventually.

Not only the buyer, seller also will be facing a popular problem about online auction - the buyer giving up the bid, especially after bid close. In the digital world, many people forget their responsibility of their behavior, it is not surprise that buyers give up their bidding. In online auction website, seller should pay the publication fee for selling their merchandise. If the buyers give up the bid, they may lose their publication fee. Although some auction website may be refund the fee for seller, it is application and time wasting to get it. After the failure of communicating with the buyer about the bid, some of the sellers may give a 'bad' evaluation to these buyers, but I think it is a useless action. If the buyer give back you a bad feedback and 'bad' evaluation, you will only lose the confidence and credibility.

(My experience of giving a ‘bad’ evaluation to the buyer who are no response after the bid)

Online auction may have the potential digital hazard in the trade, as long as the concession of creating fake information, we may face the auction scam in the online shop.