Sac area Craigslist (Roseville) '91 black on black $15k

[csavaglio]

Tim,
What I wrote pretty much explains it. When you list, you pay your listing fee.....sometimes it's cheap, depending on what specials they're running, sometimes it's around $50 depending on options, full auction, buy it now, etc. You pay that no matter what, whether it sells or not. If there's a winning bidder, you pay the ebay final fees. On vehicles, the fee is $150 when the final value is over a certain amount (I think it's $2000, if I recall).

On vehicles and real estate, bids are non-binding. This means that a winning bidder has just bid for the option of buying the vehicle at that price.

Pretty much everything else falls into the binding category, such as car parts and other items. Which means that a bid is a binding contract and the buyer must pay.

It's pretty bad for people that list their cars truthfully, but that's the way it is. From personal experience and the experiences of others I've talked to, a lot fewer of the "sold" cars on ebay actually end up as completed transactions. I've had more than one car end up like that and several friends have too.

Here's ebay's policy and I've confirmed this on the phone. Basically, according to several phone conversations, the winning bidder can decide not to buy the vehicle for any reason, from valid (the car wasn't described truthfully) to bogus (the buyer just didn't want the car) despite the policy that ebay says that buyers remorse isn't a good reason. Unfortunately, because it's non binding, the buyer doesn't even have to give a reason. Or even contact the seller (my last car that "sold" on ebay).

Here's their policy....

http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/...-vehicles.html

Basically, and this is from the folks at ebay themselves, having a car for auction on ebay is just another form of advertising to attract and generate interest in the vehicle, but someone bidding on it doesn't really mean anything since the bidder is under no obligation to buy the car.


Chris