Kijiji troubles

[fox]

Some of you might remember my rant at a PLUG MUG about my negative dealings on Kijiji. One in particular, where the prospective buyer emailed me multiple times over a week about a watch I was selling, including a time and place of his choosing to arrange the sale, and then he never showed up or communicated again. Since then, I have had a number of other negative experiences with selling this watch, where a person was interested, offered me a lower price which I accepted, and then asked for a meeting but never followed through on my reply. I finally googled these kinds of behaviours on Kijiji, and it turns out that plenty of sellers have had similar negative experiences; some actually worse. I guess that this is human nature in the internet age; lots of people who have no consideration for others, but can hide behind the anonymity of Kijiji. (You can't rate sellers or buyers on Kijiji.)

Since there is nothing I can do about it, I decided that I'll just lower my expectations; it's still a good place to post because it's free and lots of people use it. It's interesting that up until I went to sell a watch, I never had any of these negative experiences. Because of the type of item, I have an alternative hypothesis to explain my experiences with a watch for sale. There may be a wholesaler or a pawn shop out there that wants to discourage private ads that could eat into their business, or even discourage me enough to sell the item at a ridiculously low price to them. A good way to do this would be to annoy the seller with pretend buyers so that they either stop posting or are softened up enough to virtually give away the item. It's easy to set up multiple accounts on Kijiji, and these could be used to give the impression of lots of pretend buyers. Any thoughts on this?   

[Jason]

It sounds like a great hypothesis but is there any evidence for it? I mean, are pawn shops or wholesalers out there really that desperate? More likely that you've just found some jerks or that the kind of people who buy expensive watches have a higher ratio of jerks to normal people. Don't worry, you're probably one of the normal people. 

[fox]

What made me think of this is that I got an inquiry from someone who was clearly a wholesaler in Toronto. (I looked up their record and they had a bunch of watches posted. The person asked what is the lowest price I would sell the watch for. I replied by asking what would they pay for it, and got no reply thereafter. This just got me wondering, plus the fact that I haven't seen the type of annoying inquiries that I'm getting now until after this guy posted. Weak evidence at best, but enough to construct a hypothesis from.

[buster]

I didn't know anyone wore watches anymore. They seem redundant. Maybe that's why you are selling yours.

[ssfc72]

Fox, i believe you mentioned that your first watch buyer had other items on Kijiji, that he was selling. I don t think a used watch merchant, that was trying to get you out of the market, would have other kijiji listings, on his phony kijiji name.

[fox]

Good point, Bill, but I think that this Kijiji name is what he sells from. I'm not saying this person is the culprit, but hypothetically he could have a bunch of false names to use to discourage sellers and eventually get an item for nothing. Again, just a hypothesis to explain what I have been experiencing since posting the watch. It is certainly more plausible that all the inquiries are unconnected, and happen to be from a mix of individuals, some of whom are not courteous at best.

I know that in my case, I have inquired about a lot of items that I didn't follow up on, but in these cases, I hadn't asked about price or if I did, I wasn't interested in the price. Anytime I have ever agreed on price, I have followed through. I can understand someone even agreeing on price and then deciding afterwards that they weren't really interested and having no further communication. What I can't accept as reasonable behaviour is having someone agree on price, inquire about meeting to complete the transaction, and then not responding to a reply with suggested meeting place and date. The minimum consideration I would expect at that point is a message indicating they were no longer interested.

[buster]

Did any of these reluctant buyers seem to write as if English is a second language? Is it possible he is actually a she, maybe from China?

[fox]

No. Their English was fine.

[fox]

My troubles are no more; I got the ending I deserved. The watch was sold last Saturday to a very nice guy who showed up when he said he would and paid a reasonable price. Interestingly enough, he was one of the people who inquired when the ad was last posted, a few days before I took the ad down, and his email to me came when the ad was no longer posted.