Another eBay scam

[Steve Firth]

Perhaps one of these days, you could learn what you're talking abut?

Just a suggestion.

[Bruce]

Thanks, but I learned all I needed to know from these links:

TinyURLs (full links below):

links for those who don't like TinyURLs:

[Dave Plowman (News)]

You'll only pay the maximum if someone else bids up to it.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Did just the same on an old piece of test gear which had no real value than other to a collector, so difficult to price. Just missed winning it then got this second chance offer which I also said I'd only accept at the price I'd offered before the winning 'bidder' joined in. Since the chances of there being two items remote.

It then got re-listed. And the same happened again.

In my case they did. And banned the seller. Of course it's easy to set up a new account.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

At any auction you'd be foolish to pay more than you wanted to. How do you know the seller was bidding for his own item? You can't do that directly. Of course you can ask a mate to do it for you.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

On Ebay you can't bid for the item you're selling unless you use a different identity, etc.

[Steve Firth]

olive oils. The persons performing the testing are referred to as "experts" but their expertise is not explained. The oils included in the comparison are not named, only the top three are named. The baiss on which a "star rating" was derived is not explained.

Mirror. It's not an independent reference.

It's not an independent reference, other than it being a reference to the Independent.

Telegraph. It's not an independent reference. However it does usefully explain that the oils used for comparison included:

Marks & Spencer, Carapelli, Bertolli, Sainsbury's and Felippo Berio

Which explains a lot. Each of those oils is a blended olive oil, prepared using olive oil of various ages, selected from more than one country and blended to provided a consistent and particularly bland product. The oils will also be chosen to be particularly cheap.

The price charged for those products will never approach the prices charged for single estate extra virgin olive oil. Just as the price charged for Thunderbird, Buckfast Tonic Wine and Lambrini will never approach the price charged for a bottle of Pirus, Montrachet, Grange or Clos des Papes.

As has been explained to you before, and as you appear to be incapable of understanding, olive oil in Italy is sold into a free and open market. The price that the oil sells for is therefore the price that the consumer is willing to pay. For this years harvest that price for bulk sales of more than 1000kg works out at around EUR 8.50 per litre, with a considerable variation based on the provenance of the oil. Exactly as the price for wine varies based upon the provenance of the wine.

At a price of EUR 8.50 per litre, few farms make what anyone would consider to be an excessive profit. Half of the cost of production will be given as a payment to the olive pickers. Another 25% will go to those who prune the trees, leaving the farmer with 25% of the sales value of his oil to pay for the other labour incurred during the year and the capital costs associated with production (tractors, harvestine machinery, the costs associated with running an oil press or the millers' fees for pressing the oil etc).

Therefore if you get offered olive oil for sale at a price lower than £8.50 per litre in the supermarket you should at the very least start to wonder how the supermarket can sell that oil at less than the cost of production. The bottle will probably cost somewhere between £0.50 and £1.00, labelling costs, transport costs and the supermarkets will then take 50% of the sale price for themselves. Or to put it another way, for every pound given to the farmer, the supermarket will take a pound.

Now, given that a farmer can sell all of his production at the farm gate to passing trade at EUR 8.50 per litre and by doing that he has to pay nothing for marketing, nothing for the containers, nothing to salesmen and nothing for transport perhaps you, with your superior grasp of the olive oil market can explain why a farmer producing DOP extra virgin olive oil would wish to sell that oil for £4.25 a litre or less to a British or German supermarket and then have to subsidise the labelling, bottling, transport and in-store marketing for that product?

The report you referred to indicates olive oil being sold at £2.50 or less per litre. That's an impossible price for Italian extra virgin olive oil.

But of course, my experience as a farmer can't possibly equal your experience as a reader of Which?

Do you need tags to go with that?

[Bruce]

But some people have multiple eBay accounts. I personally have four.

My household has a total of six, and there are only two of us!

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Will Ebay accept bids where the seller and buyer have the same IP address?

[Bruce]

It isn't about my opinion. It is about the opinion of expert independent tasters published in a what is generally accepted as a reputable consumer magazine, Which?

I'm quite happy to accept the verdict of the expert tasters. I am perfectly happy with the olive oil I buy. Why should I pay several times more for another olive oil on the basis of a thoroughly biased opinion from someone who has a personal axe to grind, grind, grind and grind again? And again? And again?

[AlanG]

Mu wife bought it. She got caught up in the bidding. Shit happens

I suspect he had a pal or had two accounts. It seemed an easy enough thing to do at that time since Ebay seemed to be working on email addresses. I could quite easily have set up a home account and another at the business address.

[Steve Firth]

Tssk, now why would someone want to do that?

[Steve Firth]

The experience of those "expert independent tasters" has not been explained by Which? They simply state that they are expert and independent. Expert in what? Is the question that needs answering.

Oh well, in that case our oil has won gold awards in blind tasting conducted by the Fine Food Guild. So presumably you accept their verdict that our product is not simply the best "of the supermarket brands" but the best of all oils presented for judgement in those years?

Good for you, continue to enjoy it. Has anyone suggested that you were anything other than happy with the product that you buy?

No one has even suggested that you should. It's a free market, if you want to put axle grease on your bread and decorate cakes with Vaseline on the grounds that it's cheap and relatively tasteless no one will stop you.

You appear to be unable to distinguish cause and effect. The one who has the axe to grind is you. I hadn't mentioned olive oil nor my role as a producer of olive oil. You chose to raise the matter (again) for reasons that are neither clear nor I suspect particularly relevant.

I mentioned my experience with eBay's treatment of those who report auction scams to them. You chose to respond with an off-topic rant about supermarket olive oils.

Now, once more, you seem to have ignored the question that I posed. Why should a producer of extra-virgin olive oil choose to sell that oil at dumping prices to a supermarket when all of his production can be sold for higher prices at lower cost to visitors to the farm?

As a corollary, how likely is it that supermarkets could buy, bottle and sell oil at less than one quarter of the wholesale price?

You've been asked similar questions in the past, you run away each time and then will start with your rant about Which? and blended oils in response to completely unrelated posts. Are you seeking medical treatment for your apparent bouts of mental affliction?

[Bob Eager]

Pretty easy to fix that too (although I accept that techie help might be needed). Anonymizers work OK. And in this house, every PC has a different (public) IP address.

[JimK]

maybe he's just teasing you?

[Fredxx]

It has become more difficult to setup a bogus account, you now need to verify through giving some financial account details. Much better to get a mate, spouse or partner to bid for you.

[Fredxx]

A result, he'd also have lost his feedback.

[Bruce]

Perhaps your price is unnecessarily inflated, whether through production inefficiency or profiteering or some other reason.

Perhaps you should be asking yourself (rather than me!) why your olive oil costs so much, rather than sneering at supermarket olive oils that offer a very attractive combination of high quality and outstanding value for money.

I see no reason to pay more than Aldi or Lidl prices, although I often choose to pay more for other foodstuffs where I can taste the difference, and enjoy the more expensive product to the extent that it is worth paying the extra.

[Bruce]

As if I would do such a thing! ;-)

I think the word is "baiting", because he never fails to bite.

[John Rumm]

I would expect they have to, since there are ISPs out there that use web proxy services, and do many large companies.