This is a repeat of a post which I did that was locked for reasons known only by the MOD but please read and consider when thinking about doing business with UBID. Here is the original post:
After reading through a post yesterday on a hot CPU deal, I decided to take a link over to UBID. A strange but nauseating sense of deja vu came over me as I punched through the different auctions. Could this be "Son of Egghead"?
I purchased a few things from Egghead last summer prior to infamous fiasco when hackers got into their database and Egghead had to warn people to begin checking their credit card statements. Even before that, I was pretty fed up with Egghead auctions. Setting aside the fact that they botched orders so badly (sent wrong stuff, missing items, didn't match specs, etc.), what really turned me off was what appeared to be obvious shill bidding. If you are not familiar with the practice, shill bids are fake bids placed either by or in behalf of the seller to artificially inflate the selling price or to prevent sale at a price lower than the seller wants to accept.
I saw it happen repeatedly when large quantities of an item went up for sale, bids would be made for the entire lot at very marginal prices. Although I have no proof, it had to be a shill bid because a volume deal at the bid price no longer made economic sense. When you added the bid price with the S&H, which almost always was charged per item bid, the product could have been purchased cheaper from other sources. Furthermore, given the volitility of pc component prices, the usual delays which were common in Egghead auctions would have been unacceptable. In other words, the price was too high for the level of risk involved. I cannot imagine a reseller entering into that type of transaction.
Well, since yesterday I have been monitoring several UBID auctions and it appears to me that there is shill bidding on UBID, too. The obvious one is where someone has placed a bid for an entire lot of 111 AMD T-Birds 1.2/200MHz at $85 each with an estimated shipping charge of $9. Yeah, that would be an OK price for a one-off but not if you are in the business. Consider that this is technology being phased out for the 266 FSB, the price of Tbirds continue to fall, factor in the amount of time it will take to receive and then turn around for resale...and then someone is placing a quantity bid which is only 4 or 5 dollars less than they can purchase off the web??? This smells like &%$)*&@#$.
Forgive me for the rant...but am I just being paranoid or do others see the same pattern? Is there anything that can be done about this? I'm normally skeptical about regulations but this really appears to be simply another form of consumer fraud.
Again, I have no proof and this may be a perfectly legitmate web-site...but it sure makes you wonder?
Update - Before this auction ended yesterday, the same suspected shill bidder, an "nb of San Diego" place another bid of $89 for the entire lot of 111 cpu's shortly before the close of the auction. Yes, it could have been legitimate but a more likely scenario is that the seller, UBID in this instance, didn't want to sell for less that $94 which was the next bid increment up. After adding in the inflated shipping, it was probably a breakeven deal.[b/]