eBay

volga21 · ‎19-08-2024

I'm a collector of postcards of a particular subject matter. I know there are a (very) few other collectors out there, and when a rare PC comes up the bidding is sometimes fierce.

So...about 15 cards came up for auction, all extremely unusual and ending on Sunday night at 2-3 minute intervals. Because I didn't want to disclose my interest, I opted to bid in person based on firing in a single high bid in the closing seconds.

Although my main address is in the UK, I also live abroad and last night I was bidding from abroad. But the seller is clearly accustomed to overseas buyers as the listing said "Orders over £50.00 in value from international buyers will only be sent by International Signed For @ £10.00." and my primary addrss is UK. But I guess my IP address would have shown that I was abroad, if eBay looks at that..

So...the first auction comes up, I fire in my bid with about 10 seconds to go, and am greeted with "You are unable to purchase this item due to restrictions from the seller. Please contact the seller for more information. (3008)".

The seller is clearly a business and has set up the auction on a Sunday night so he can come in on Monday and send everything out - so, predictably, there was no rsponse to my urgent query of what this is about...I was unable to bid on any of the items and they all sold at mere fractions of my intended bids.

I guess my lesson from this is to always place a marker bid early in the auction to tease out issues like this. But I'd really like to know what restriction the seller could have made, and what this 3008 code is...

Thanks

g_ringo · ‎22-03-2025

But how do you explain, that I was successful to buy one item (not finished order) and after that tried to bid more auctions - this 3008 message, restriction!

With UK seller - I did finished order and tired later to buy more - restriction 3008!

I did have 2 unpiad cases. But I contacted to eBay and they did remove them.

papso22 · ‎22-03-2025

Either the sellers have personally blocked you but don't want to admit it, or ebay have not removed the non payment cases.

davrman · ‎22-03-2025

@g_ringo wrote:
But how do you explain, that I was successful to buy one item (not finished order) and after that tried to bid more auctions - this 3008 message, restriction!

With UK seller - I did finished order and tired later to buy more - restriction 3008!

There's another option that sellers can have switched on: "Block buyers who are currently winning or have bought X items in the last 10 days", where X is a number chosen by the seller. It also has a sub-option to "Only apply this limit to buyers with a Feedback score of: Y" where Y can be a number from 0 to 5. This feature was designed to stop scammers buying up all of a seller's stock, but if it's set to a low number it can prevent genuine buyers from purchasing additional items...