How long to wait before something is done?

This Ebay scam advert (item number 260035715523) is still online despite my reporting it over 24 hours ago. Let’s see how long it takes them to remove the advert.

My fingerprints

I’m flattered that people have lifted my (over) use of ‘Signature’ when describing a colour or specification unique to a particular model. It’s also quite amusing to see whole chunks of description that I have written cut and pasted into other adverts. If plagiarism is a form of flattery than I am happy to see my copy in abundance online. But be careful, too much copying and I’ll be accused of spamdexing! (Another new word from this Millennium)

P.S. The spellchecker has been unsuccessfully attempting to change spamdexing to Spandex – trust me, unlike Justin Hawkins you will never see me wearing Spandex!

Yet Another EBAY Scam Item

Just by clicking Renault For Sale I immediately saw a Renault Clio 172 at a too good to be true £2000 – fancy one for sprints and hillclimbs? Maybe it’s a Cat A B C or D write off, no dream on, it’s another scam post. Here’s the example and here’s the reply to an enquiry as to location and ultimate price. Worryingly there’s a good feedback rating, but on closer inspection there’s many duplicate buyers – this is a truly huge scheme.

Hello there,
I know that you have many choices on eBay and I appreciate that you contacted me.Although I am registered in the UK , but I recently moved in NY United States (where my family is from) and the car is being shipped from here. I made the auction for UK due to the fact it’s UK version (right handed), meet all the UK standards, and its better to ship it where it belongs, that means UK, because here in United States is very difficult to drive this type of vehicle, so i am trying to sell it as low as i can to complete the sale fast (my loss will be your gain). It still has UK registration, cos I didn’t paid for United States import taxes so it will be very easy for you to register the car in your country. Also the car is still registered there so you don’t have to pay any import taxes or any other fees.The car meets United Kindom DOT and EPA guidelines so there will be no problems regarding UK Customs policy on receiving the car.The car is in a perfect cosmetic and engine condition! s, and meticulously maintained. No damage, no scratches or dents, no hidden defects, the engine doesn’t smoke, runs and sounds awesome, the engine has never been repaired or something like that, never been into accidents and it is as advertised .The car comes with log book, HPI cleared, it is free of encumbrances and liens. You will get from me the keys and all documents to register the car in UK , and also a bill of sale in your name and signed by me.If the car is not how i described it, i will offer a full refund, upon the return of the item in original condition (return postage at my expense). It will be insured during transportation and will be delivered at your front door in maximum 2 weeks. Final price is GBP 2,000.00 (this price includes the shipping and insurance).
I wait your final decision and I will contact ebay and tell them to contact you with the transaction details in order to buy under their PURCHASE PROTECTION & REFUND PLAN. (SIC! sc)
Thank you!

No really, thank you for trying to rip me or anyone else off who is unfortunate enough to fall for this scam. Hopefully Ebay will soon eradicate these scam posts.

Found it on Ebay?

I recently received a link to a novelty song about Ebay. I’m not normally into that kind of thing but it is very clever. I’ve linked to it here but be warned you may get the odd pop-up if you click through.

I mention this because it relates to the good natured side of Ebay, where you can sometimes grab a bargain, and other times get a big chunk of buyer’s remorse, but take it on the chin because you had some fun bidding for that snow globe you had on the mantelpiece as a kid.

But of course as we all know, with good comes evil and Ebay is a great place for the unscrupulous to lurk and make us all wary of even the most reputable company trading there. The problem is that in my opinion Ebay, will always take the route with the least effort required to resolve a situation. Where an automated e-mail will do they will apply that as a solution. Quick to jump on you if you inadvertently ’spam’ a keyword (I mentioned the word Xenon in an advert title and the ad was summarily pulled) they have even made me complete a twenty minute tutorial for daring to reply to an e-mail address posted in an advert. I felt like I was completing Ebay Community Service! BUT when the real scams abound they seem to do little or nothing to get on top of it, despite protestations to the contrary in the press about regulating the system etc. Here’s a current example.

I have heard recently, away from Ebay, that the popular scam of recent times, the ‘phishing’ for people who will accept an International money transfer for more than the value of the goods so a shipping agent can be paid to collect them – but they then pull the money after you have advanced to the ’shipping agent’ – leaving you with either a loss to the value of the shipping, or maybe worse with a loss greater than the value of your car! had graduated to people emanating from Holland who are offering cars at silly low prices to extract the cash from us. They send a reasonably plausible e-mail response to an enquiry for a car that you expect to be in the UK to say that they are based in Holland and that the price includes ’shipping’ the car back to the UK. Safe to say the giveaway is that it’s a lazy cut and paste and they often refer to a completely different item in the text. But some people are going to be fooled into thinking they have grabbed an Ebay bargain.

I’m mentioning it here and have posted the e-mail for you to be aware of the scam, but the prevalence of cars worth around ten thousand on sale with no reserve at three thousand is proof that Ebay aren’t doing much to resolve the situation.

To cap it all, it’s impossible to get a direct e-mail link to Ebay, so I waited on hold to a phone number I have through my Pro account only to be cut off after fifteen minutes. Hence my blogging the complaint. I know by the traffic through the site that quite a few will read this and I would ask you all to propagate the message.

Here’s the content of the e-mail response sent to me, (see change in item mid-way!) so please take care.

Hello Steve and thank you for your interest for ”ANY HIGH VALUE PRODUCT ON EBAY WITH NO RESERVE”. First of all you should know that the Renault is in excellent condition, mechanically and aesthetically intact, it’s UK model with UK specs and it has less than 26,500 miles on it. This is an always garaged vehicle. The exterior is in mint condition, the overall interior is pristine throughout, no rips, tears, burns, stains or worn spots anywhere, NEVER smoked in. The car is road taxed until August 2007. There is no outstanding finance on the car and it is HPI clear. Although my ebay account was initiated in United Kingdom, I’m located in Holland for the moment and I’m willing to ship the item from here through Sea Cargo and cover the shipping and insurance fees to your location. The total price is £3,200 GBP with insured shipping included. The price is low because I had to sale the car to avoid local taxes here, and I thought selling this Volkswagen through ebay would be a good idea, giving the fact that I need some fast cash for buying a new bigger house here. I would like our deal to be supervised by eBay Motors. In case we have a deal I will notify eBay Motors UK transactions department so they can inform you about my reliability and how we can proceed with this transaction in a 100% safe way.
So if you are ready to proceed just let me know your full name and address and I will notify them so we can both get detailed information regarding proper payment, shipping and insurance to be used for this international deal. Please let me know your position as soon as possible.

Post script. I’m certain that at any time after the initial response certain plausible delays will result in a confusion long enough for them to extract our cash without dispatching the goods.

The Internet has killed local advertising

I would like to sell a few more cars locally. There’s a benefit in this, as you would like to think that as time passed, repeat and referral business would be easier to service and it would be nice to be building a reputation in the local area, where perhaps sometime in the future I might have more than just an industrial unit to sell cars from. There’s a snag though. Local advertising is a waste of money.

I am now into a second run of local advertising. I put the failure of the first run, circa £1200 spend – two enquiries,one test drive and one sale (actually a number of weeks after the run ended, so I can only assume it was used as a filler advert) down to the fact that local people have an adversity to dealing with someone who advertised with a mobile phone number and no premises address. This doesn’t seem to affect Autotrader enquirers, but there you go. So, with some new enthusiasm and some different ‘local’ cars to advertise three weeks ago I began a new run of ads. Landline number, business address and website. Even a ‘Car Of The Week’ hero car at the top of the advert. The result so far… Ziltch, Nada, Zero, Sweet Football Association. I’m prompted to post on the blog as they are now chasing me for a cheque.

If I were to use the same amount of budget on the Autotrader Online adverts I upload, I would be able to advertise fifteen cars for two weeks each. I know from analysis that this would generate a significant number of enquiries and definitely result in test drives and sales. If I spent the money on Ebay, I’d be able to advertise twenty cars for two weeks. Soon that will be (evidently) one hundred cars for a £150 spend per week. You can see how much more cost efficient Autotrader and Ebay are to local advertising in newspapers. Add in that I even get e-mails and calls via the website on cars that haven’t been advertised and local newspapers are even less effective per £1.

So, do you think that they are doing anything to alleviate this problem and come up with something competitive to keep the business?Er, no. Why’s that? I have a feeling it’s because unlike myself and a minority who analyse it, larger dealer managers just place the full page ads every week and therefore keep a nice revenue heading towards the newspapers. By right, newspaper advertising should be a fraction of what it costs now, and I’d lay odds on 90% of car dealers don’t monitor ad spend let alone divert a good proportion to maximise online presence. Having said that, even when they do push online ads, they get ripped of by Ad Agencies and ‘Search Engine Otimisation’ and ‘Pay Per Click’ specialists who produce and gear up the dealer websites to suit themselves. I checked out a big dealer group’s Ad Agency created website recently and they have one page ranked by Google!I have about fifty and another friend over two hundred. Pleased to say that he and I are not in competition! Of course the dealer groups are up there at the top of the listings, because they pay a fortune to the agencies for pay per click links. Other elementary mistakes are also ‘planted’ in the websites to prevent them ranking, therefore ‘proving’ how effective PPC is…I have to assume that this tactic is calculated as it would be inept for a professional web designer to duplicate copy to the extent that search engine robots would discount it when indexing.

So the future is online. I suppose eventually local people will use the Internet more than local papers anyway, so it’s only a matter of time before my local enquiries increase. Patience is a virtue.  

         

Cherished transfers are a menace…

Anybody thinking of making a living as a car dealer had better factor in quite a bit more money to have outstanding whilst cherished number plate transfers are administered by DVLA. Ever since January 2006 when they ceased to do them over the counter at your local office i.e give you back the green slip (V5C/2) at least with the new registration number written on and a certificate to go buy the new number plates. It now has to all be done at DVLA Swansea and seems to take anything up to a month for the green slip to come back, and then about a week later the new V5. OK, so it’s possible to sell the car with the green slip and use a V62 form to advise DVLA of the new owner, but we would all like the actual complete V5 really.

The alternative is to not buy cars in this predicament, leaving them for traders with greater funds to buy something that’s ideal stock. Ditto this whole scenario with clearing outstanding finance. It can get pretty tiresome waiting for (say) Renault Financial Services (RFS) to take a car off of HPI or Experian even after they have been long paid and the money gone from my account. I’ve taken to sending them CHAPS transfer payments straight into their account to speed up the process.  

This is a pertinent point because I have two lovely low mileage immaculate cars that i am sitting on until the V5 of some description turns up. The upside, a little time to prep them in the meantime.

Since a few people read my blog and make comments elsewhere, a point about Titanium Clio 182 with Cup Packs. In my own opinion they are rarer than say a Black-Gold one, justified by the lack of them offered to me on a monthly basis and the percentage of them that have come through the system in relation to Black or Artic Blue. There may be plenty of silver 172 and 182 regular cars, but the scarcity of the silver with both Cup Packs coming through my business justifies the rare moniker.

We could also debate the point at which after market car Hi Fi can be described as (In Car Entertainment) ICE or esoteric HiFi upgrades. I suppose gold tipped monster cabling and maybe a front end by the likes of Nakamichi might be a tipping point.

Off to collect a low mileage Clio Trophy with a better than standard stereo!

  

Tugged by EBAY

Went to list my GTT Cooper S 210 on EBAY and found that I had been banned for ‘Contravention of listing policy’ In other words linking to the website etc. So what about everyone who puts their mobile phone number in the advert? My penance…to complete an eleven point tutorial about listing policy. I had to laugh, one part of me wanted to do a Larry David (Curb Your Enthusiasm) and bite the hand that feeds with a sarcastic e-mail about ‘Community Service’ the other, just bite my lip and clicked the next button. I actually got ten out of eleven correct anyway. But then I knew the policy, that’s why I was bending it. Chris Evans made the point..”It’s better to say sorry than ask permission” That’s my boy.

So, to make the most of cross links, I’ll do it in reverse, the web spiders love a bit of linking. The link’s below.

Still haven’t finished my local ad and I am going to watch the repeat of Jenson Button’s maiden GP win in ten minutes. A fantastic result that rewards his fabulous smooth driving style. He would have won GPs already if he a) hadn’t been dumped by Williams when they had a winning car and b) been dumped by Briatore after he spent at least a year honing the then uncompetitive car and V10 Renault engine which went on to win the F1 Championship the following year. I saw Nigel Mansell win his first race after many attempts and he went on to win the title eventually. Here’s hoping that Honda can give Jenson the car he needs to emulate the feat over the next couple of years. Now he has the monkey off his back he has a great chance.

2004 MINI Cooper S Chilli GTT 210 BHP on EBAY

Between a rock and a hard place.

Personally delivered a car to Chelmsford today. I’d like to thank whoever decided to close two of the toll booths at the Dartford Tunnel for the extra one hour crawl from the A21 to the tunnel, although the appointment I was trying to get home in time for has been cancelled.

As a car dealer with one eye on any potential car sales sites, there’s a marked difference between Essex ‘The Used Car Capital of the UK’, where there seems to be a used car dealer at every corner, or indeed along entire roads in the Leigh on Sea and Southend areas and here in West Sussex, where every garage or car pitch that may come along is snapped up as retirement flat developments. The land being worth between £750000 and £1M per acre prohibits any thought of developing a car sales site.

So the upshot is that any new business such as my own develops in industrial units. It’s not the end of the world, because you can make up for the lack of passing traffic by using the money saved on cheaper premises on targeted advertising. Of course you don’t get the impulse buyers or word of mouth from people who do not use the car magazines or Internet to search for a new car. However, most car sales sites are purchased with a view of the land increasing in value during ownership, the business having a value when you come to sell up or retire. Most industrial units are leasehold, writing off that ‘retirement’ revenue. 

Maybe the local council need to be enlightened as to the requirements of fledgling businesses, by passing plans for PLC style car sales estates they probably think they are already flying the flag, but of course, businesses have to start somewhere and right now, there’s nowhere to go.

It’s good to know though that despite so many cars available in East London and Essex, people will buy a car from here if you offer the right product and the right price and condition.

 

Rain stops prep

I spent most of yesterday ‘doing a Wimbledon’ i.e working at preparing cars for sale between rain breaks as well as trying to photograph my Petrol Blue Clio 182 in the sun, Murphy’s Law states that when you want to photograph a car that reflects the colour of the sky above, it will be stormy. Hence the pictures, which turned out anything between grey, green and blue, sometimes in the same picture. Quite how TVR effectively photograph those Ultra-Pearlescent car finishes they produce is beyond me. Basically, the car looks fabulous, but you would need to look at the picture taken by Renault (posted before) to get a reasonable impression of how sky-blue this car can look.

Anyone got an opinion on the new V5 Registration Documents? They are not really that new, having been changed these past couple of years. However, they do cause complications when a Cherished Number Plate is involved. Because the previous owner of a car has no obligation to forward the new V5 with it’s replacement number once he has part-exchanged, more often then not they don’t bother – having owned their new car for up to six weeks. The upshot being the dealer has just the V5/C Green Slip to tax the car with and/or pass onto the new owner. Whilst it makes no difference, I agree that most people get reassurance from seeing the both sides of the whole V5, despite the fact that they only take away the right hand page, or which only the green slip is of any interest. The DVLA form V62 makes up for the left hand page when it’s not available, but I think that the previous owner should be obliged to forward the new V5 showing the new number once it’s in their possession. Now we’re used to the system , it’s not so bad, but this element of it even confuses staff at the DVLA offices, who sent me back a V5 Green Slip, my fee and V62 with a tax disc! Not such a bad thing as that meant the car is still only one owner for the new purchaser.

I have bid on a number of interesting cars, ranging from a Renault Modus Initiale, top of the range car (available at half price new if it comes) to bidding just that little bit more to own a Renaultsport Megane 225 Trophy offered to a BMW dealer. These are very hard to buy as generally originally bought by private owners, they understandably cannot afford the first years depreciation and any hire purchase early settlement charges to change the car too quickly. The majority of nearly new cars coming from large companies or rental fleets, who a) paid less to start with and b) who can afford? to write the cars off quickly. It would be good if these and a few other cars priced during the week came my way as I am becoming short of the stock I prefer.

Will see what the weekend brings.

If it ain’t broke…

Seems that EBAY have created a new form for adding details. The great new system crashes while uploading pictures and no longer remembers payment details. So I host the pictures myself and then the slide-show won't work either. It has 'Curbed My Enthusiasm'

Also an item I am bidding on is defintely being bid up by the vendor (or friend) it's just so obvious. First of all the item sold on Buy It Now to someone who seems like a regular buyer from them, then it comes back online (he probably realised it was too obvious) but the new high bid is about what he told me he wanted for it. He's about as good at this as Michael Schumacher is at parking his Ferrari at La Rascasse!