Are people really that stupid
Posted on Monday 20th October 2008
eBay is a useful service. I’m sure many of you have used, as have I, to obtain those diffiult-to-find objects or get a bargain. It is also a useful means of making some cash, and before leaving the UK I made over £300 selling some of our unneeded stuff.
However it seems not every eBayer is that savvy. As you gathered from a recent posting we are in the market for a Wii. I thought I’d see if we could save some money buying one on eBay. There were a few available and I placed my bids thinking I had set a reasonable price. You can imagine my surprise when we looked on eBay a day later to find the bidding had spiralled out of control:
The package was probably only worth a little over $700 when new, but sold as used and with no warranty should have fetched a lot less. It went for $710 not including another $40-50 the seller would have charged for postage. The poor sap who won the auction has really shot himself in the foot on this one.
A little deterred but still willing to give eBay a chance I then looked for a Wiifit. Most on offer are brand-new units available from the United States. You would have thought with the looming recession, retailers would be cutting prices to keep sales turning over. In reality it was quite the opposite, and seller seem to be asking ridiculous amounts. They even adopt the familiar extortion tactic of making the unit price cheap but then asking a silly amount of money for postage:
If you bought either the top or bottom item, you would pay a little over $250. This may not sound too excessive until you spot the following advert in the K-Mart catalogue:
The mind boggles that anyone who be so stupid as to buy one of the eBay rip-offs, but looking back through various sellers’ history shows many naive buyers. I don’t blame the sellers as they are simply in the business of making money, but surely people need to be a little more aware of what they are paying for.
Food for thought next time you go online for a “bargain”.
Speaking of eBay, some people are paying ridiculous amounts for Les Mills resources. Some recent sales of cd/dvd/notes kits have
fetched over $300 each … 5 times the price from Les Mills themselves! I know it’s against the deed of understanding to sell them, but
if buyers are prepared to pay that much for them, and they must be dedicated fanatics, then they may as well book themselves for
module training – they can then legally buy them for a fraction of the cost, and at the same time, further their knowledge of the programs
that they obviously love!