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Over the past year, we've received a number of inquiries regarding the practice of creating listings that allow bidders to remain anonymous (i.e. "User ID kept private").  Because of warnings from excellent guide writers such as beware-of-fraud, bidders have been cautious in approaching this type of auction for two reasons:

1. Scammers were/are using this feature to prevent other Ebayers from warning bidders that the auction is a scam.  For example, a scammer lists an item for a 1 day auction (common scammer practice) with userid kept private.  An Ebayer like beware-of-fraud becomes aware of the scam listing and looks to see who's bidding.  If the userids are private, beware-of-fraud has no way of identifying bidders to send them an Ebay message.  All he can do is warn Ebay and hope the listing is removed in time.
2. "Shill Bidding" - Unethical sellers will either collude by bidding on each other's listings, or sellers will create multiple Ebay id's (yes, Ebay allows this) and use one id to bid on items sold through another id (against Ebay policy, but done nevertheless).  Both mechanisms are for the sole purpose of maximizing the ending auction price.

Given those two compelling reasons to avoid auctions with userid kept private, why on earth would honest, reputable sellers continue to list items in such a manner?

Here's the flip side to argument:

1. "Fishing" - There are scammers out there who watch listings that are not private; and prey on winning bidders by sending fake emails that intentionally cause unsuspecting auction winner to inadvertently divulge their Ebay userid and password.
2. Other scams and general harrassment - When Ebayers with ill intent can see who the bidders are, those bidders lose their anonymity and subject themselves to fake "second chance offers" and other emails that simply serve to harrass them.
3. Some sellers (big and small) occassionally buy items on Ebay because items at times sell for less than wholesale.  These honest sellers prefer to bid anonymously to avoid accusations of collusion and/or competing with their own customers (yes, occassionally you compete with those you buy from - that's only fair on low-priced items).

Do these types of scams happen often?  No... but they happen often enough to cause the community to increase their "force protection" measures by the best means available to them... 

When it comes to keeping the userid private, honest, reputable sellers are really in a "Catch 22"

It's a tough call for a seller.  We all must decide which mechanism will maximize the benefit to our customers, while still enabling us to stay in business by eeking out a small profit (after the exhorbitant fees we are all charged due to lack of adequate competition).

We are very interested to hear your thoughts on this subject.  If you provide us with something valuable that we haven't considered above, we'll add it to this guide.  Email us at our email address: ShakeMyHand at Vrable.com if you'd like to help*. 

This is the price we all pay for the fools who steal from us.

Please take a moment to vote for this guide by clicking yes or no below

We wish you the best in your Ebay journey; and we look forward to shaking your hand some day.

ShakeMyHand

*Of course, you can also respond to us by using the Ebay message feature, since anti-scam authors also warn against sellers who provide their emails in listings - the problem in responding to guides using Ebay's messaging feature is that sometimes Ebay blocks Ebayers from communicating with this feature if it is not done in conjunction with a particular auction - i.e. if you write us using "contact member" with suggestions, we will receive your message, but when we type our response and hit "send", Ebay will occassionally block that response, and we will have lost the message we just typed and won't likely have the energy or time to recreate our response and then track you down to ensure that you get it.  This blocking feature is an Ebay mechanism for preventing buyers and sellers from making deals outside of Ebay for the purpose of avoiding fees (i.e. using Ebay's tools against Ebay).