It seems that eBay has hit on a new subliminal marketing method - sporadically ask buyers to pay random amounts after a successful bid and payment has already been completed.
Yes, as can be seen above, I was greeted with a random “pay $xx via bank deposit to seller” several times when opening my day’s successful bid links within ebay.com.au today.
What’s weird is that I cannot find any reference to the supposed $219.80. Given that this was all a bit, well, amusing, I decided to close and restart firefox, cleared the cache and tried again. Bingo - after opening each winning item from today’s shopping expedition sure enough, 2 of the 6 items declared I owed exactly the same $219.80 to the seller.
This actually caused me to pause a moment. What if an eBay newbie received the same kind of notice today? Ok, so anyone with half a brain cell is most likely going to think twice before paying a random $amount to a seller, but the question still remains - where the fuck has that $219.80 payment request come from?
But wait.. it gets better.
According to eBay, I am neither seller nor buyer, I haven’t paid $219.80 for the $10.80 part which has had $10.80 paid and I am now asked to provide feedback on the part that both has and hasn’t been paid for, that still has a payment due, as is not sold, that I am not a buyer of.. that.. something.. ehm?!!
≡ This is a journal entry relating to the topics of advertising, ebay, toys.
Brendan Borlase is a Systems and Network Administrator living in Adelaide, Australia, having lived, worked and breathed Information Technology for over 12 years. Learn more.
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