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John Mitchell tells a warning tale of selling a bike by internet auction
As the autumn weather started to really kick in, I thought it would be a good time to sell my Kawasaki EN500. I advertised the bike in the Trade-it, and a couple of free Internet sites with no joy. So I decided to give EBay a try,
Ebay, in case you have been hiding in a cave for the last few years, is an auction site where you can buy and sell all manner of goods from cuddly toys to time-share apartments. As a buyer, it’s free, but to sell an item you are charged a listing fee, which varies from £0.15 to £5.00, then a percentage of the final total, charged to your EBay account. You can set the start price, then put a reserve figure on the item you are selling, or even a “buy it now” price. These extra features are all available at a small additional charge (there really is no such thing as a free lunch).
I set the start price in my EN500 at £499, and set the reserve at £1200. I wrote a detailed description of the bike, which included tax, MOT, mileage etc. You can decide the duration of the auction, which can be as little as three days, but I went for the 10 day maximum period. I then downloaded a picture from my PC (the first one’s free), which I believe is essential, then waited for the bids to come.
In the first couple of days I had received 8 bids, but none of them had reached the reserve price. It was until 3 days before the end of auction before the bike hit the reserve price of £1200. ‘Well that’s it’ I thought ‘The bike’s sold’.
I was also pleased as the high bidder had a decent seller rating. The seller rating is made up of positive feedback comments from the people that you buy or sell from. It is always wise to check the feedback profile of the person you are trading with to see if they have had any negative comments left. You can also see what people have been buying (looking at my own profile, I had built up a “Butch Biker” profile, somewhat ruined by my wife buying Brownie uniforms using my EBay name).
With a day to go, I then received a bid for £1295, which was £45 more than I paid for the bike a year ago, “quids in” I thought! The only thing that worried me is that the high bidder had not traded on E-bay before (zero feedback) AND he was from Denmark. I’ve nothing against the Danish, it just seems a long way to come to buy a bike. No higher bids were received and the Dane was the winning bidder.
We communicated by e-mail at the end of the auction, and he said he would be over in a couple of weeks with the cash. He then left it until the day before he was due to pick to tell me that he had “heavy” domestic problems and no longer wanted the bike.
So what can you do when this happens? Not a lot! A full-scale invasion of Denmark was out of the question, as HRH has appointed their lager as one of her favourite tipples, and I am rather partial to nice bacon butty.
One thing you can to, is get your money back of EBay by filing a non-paying bidder alert on the culprit, then 10 days later you can claim your money back. You can also leave negative feedback against the non-buyer to warn others.
Ebay take this kind of thing very seriously and will take action against time-wasters or fraudsters (they have taken court action before now, so rest assured they are on the side of the genuine trader).
Luckily I had another buyer waiting in the wings, who had seen the bike advertised elsewhere who gave me the asking price, so it all worked out in the end.
Selling a bike on EBay was an interesting experience and one I have repeated since, this time with the required result from the first winning bidder. Would I buy a bike from Ebay though? Watch this space…
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