Not impressed that eBay is letting some sellers use the coronavirus shortages as an opportunity to profiteer.
A quick search shows toilet rolls and hand sanitiser are being listed at extremely high prices.
Surely, eBay should be responsible enough to discourage this sort of behaviour.
(PROFITEER = "make or seek to make an excessive or unfair profit".)
Surely, eBay should be responsible enough
It's a business.
The only thing it gives a (profanity) about is money so profiteering is great for them.
Why do people sleepwalk through life expecting businesses to behave like priests? The brainwashing is so strong.
Why do people sleepwalk because they are behaving like some priests. Who have been pushing (s$1t) up hill for years so what is new, ass wipes always stick it up idiots who are stupid and most of them drive on the road that is why we have road rage
What about people with gluten issues Coles state only two flour yet my son needs gluten free flour but Coles
state that is flour not fair while other greedy shoppers just take what they want during world war 11 such people
would have been fined or put in the slammer should bring it back now perhaps the cat of 9 tails would sort them out.
There isn't a shortage of punctuations.
Use them.
Today society is much more tolerant about people with gluten issues.
What??????
$25k……
It is very bad for the name of eBay. No wonder we could not buy no more of toilet papers and hand sanitizers in many supermarkets. EBay obviously has been used to dispose off those products by people who want to get rich quick at the expense of others’ pain. Looking from those ads, it appears there are people got hooked. It is shameful for eBay becomes their helpers.
eBay US has banned price gouging, wonder why eBay AU doesnt follow suit…
Hopefully the following report is true and carried out: Amazon has said it has policies in place to prevent opportunistic price gouging schemes and along with eBay has begun cracking down on such listings.
Sure? If it is , then good on them.
Priceline had masks for $5 each the other day. Not on eBay. In store. What you're seeing on eBay is just a microcosm of the outside world.
I read a story today where some nitwit travelled around 2 US states and cleaned out the hand sanitiser in every single store he came across in every town big or small.
Amazon have now booted him off, the twit has over 17,000 bottles of it now he can't get rid of.
I mean this with extreme prejudice - people like him should die in a fire. Yeah sure hoard tp, whatever but this is pure unadulterated greed and irresponsible.
only when you are not on the receiving end.
Receiving end of what exactly?
Reminds me of one of the post apocalyptic movies i saw, the guy stumbles upon a kfc refresher towel packet and got so excited.
Personally, I would love those profiteering from price hikes on loo paper run out of toilet paper themselves. That is justice.
How would that happen, doesn't make sense?
What you should hope is that stores start having excess stock… Coles has temporarily disallowed returns, to discourage bulk buying (from multiple stores)
I know it wouldn't but just saying it as a wish! :) I like that Coles is restricting returns and also amount purchased at one time although people are buying, returning after depositing in their car/home and buying again.
Why would they care?
AUS even doesnt care any frauds on ebay.
I have seen a lot of cases that buyers paid by cash but never receive items. police rejected to take actions even they know the sellers' name, address and phone number.
I think we should take control on ebay but who cares?
Same thing happened during the bush fires. P2 masks were $25 a box and people were selling them for 100+ per box on ebay.
Japan and Thailand have started prosecuting people hoarding / profiteering from masks
but australia can't even prosecute petrol companies …
That is true, all paid for by the companies i guess. ACCC just complain but dont do anything.
I came across a photo where in an Asian family was selling the toilet rolls in their drive way somewhere in Melbourne east, with a hefty tag, though I would call them opportunist, but also would call them inhuman as this is just ridiculous.
What if someone from their family is sick to corona and the medical system also treats them from a demand and supply perspective?
I'd just call the cops and tell them I believe they are selling stolen goods.
Have them go around and cause them some trouble.
email pauline hanson their address
How could you know that they were Asian, just from a photo?
eBay is notifying these sellers and pulling down their listings….
Ebay only cares about the fee's they are raking in with the sales
The bottom line <— Pun intended
https://www.consumer.vic.gov.au/resources-and-tools/advice-i…
https://www.consumer.vic.gov.au/contact-us/resolve-your-prob…
Nothing will happen, but it might make you feel better to write it down.
BAH should see whats happening on the stock markets and how they're trying to take advantage. Ebay is chump change`
Precisely. Millionaires and billionaires are made in times of panic/recession. ie Warren Buffet “Be Fearful When Others Are Greedy and Greedy When Others Are Fearful”
honestly got no issue with it
If you think that is excessive profiteering dont look at how expensive a bottle of water at the tennis is on a 40 degree day….
A fool and his money….. Their target market are idiots who have bought into the hysteria, for a product that you don't need for survival. I feel sorry for them in the same way that I feel sorry for people that get scammed online but you can't save everyone. The media is the main culprit in all of this, if you want to take on a cause, that's where your attention should be.
Im intrigued when big supporters of capitalism run screaming for the hills when companies take advantage of situations.
"Price gouging" is just supply and demand
well at least someone has stock to buy, wollworths and coles don't even have any to buy at my convenience.
Make hand sanitizer yourself:
https://www.who.int/gpsc/5may/Guide_to_Local_Production.pdf
Easy and cheap. Where to get high percentage ethanol? Methylated Spirits. I contacted Diggers and asked if they deliberately add any methanol to poison the product. Their answer was no. It's 95% ethanol, water, impurities from distillation, and a bitter agent.
I have no idea why my comment was voted down despite being completely factual. Here is the response from Recochem, the makers of Diggers products.
"The short answer is no. The ethanol that is used to make Methylated Spirits is Industrial Grade material. As such, it may contain some small amounts of trace impurities, which can include Methanol. However, there is no Methanol added to methylated spirits when it is made by Recochem."
The name 'methylated' spirits comes from past practices of adding methanol to poison the product. Problem is hardcore alcoholics would drink it anyway. It was better to produce a product that is denatured by tasting absolutely foul.
huh, i'm going to try making this.
I made my own too:
3l of isopropyl alcohol ($29 for 2l from Altronics)
1l glycerine ($15 from a local bulk supplies place)
So just under $60 for 4l of hand sanitiser. I think that will last us. Isopropyl alcohol is now hard to find though. Bunnings may have it but it's very expensive.
From my quick search most "offers" are just jokes.
Like a "Seller Refurbished Toilet Paper sheets / no holes" at $0.99
Not sure someone will be so immensely silly to pay a fortune for loo paper … on the other hand they do pay a fortune for houses and units so perhaps is current genetic transformation. Yes they will also pay a fortune for loo paper. Probably not for the "refurbished" one.
I understand and agree with the argument that 'raising the price, even sky high, gives a signal to producers to produce more product' It's a good thing. Those that really need a mask can pay $50 for one (say, a doctor on the way to conduct surgery) while someone who doesn't (a concerned citizen going to the supermarket for toilet paper) can't afford it.
But… it's important to note who is profiteering and skyrocketing the prices. The producer? In most cases no. The shop? In most cases the same price is kept (Bunnings, Daiso as examples). Who is raising the price? The guys running around cleaning out all the shops of products and reselling for 20x the price. The producer doesn't get more money. They aren't highly incentivized to boost production. It's just the middle man who makes all the cash. Middle men rarely bring anything useful to the table.
Sell a product for as much as possible to increase profits. Tell me how this is different to any other business model?
Not when it's a pandemic… to profit during a pandemic is uncalled for
But with that logic that means manufacturers should now drop the price of face masks because it's a pandemic and they shouldn't be making extra profit.
there is no logic, its based on feelings from sensitive people
Resell a product, not sell. These ebayers are harvesting product from stores, buying at normal prices, and reselling at massively inflated margins. A week ago I posted an eBay link to another reselling/hoarding thread where mask packs from Daiso for $2.80 were being sold for $72 plus $28 postage. Someone actually bought one.
Now one could say 'hey, that's what the market will bear! Fair is fair!' In that case, why wouldn't it be fair for doctors to require you to sign over your house to them to receive cancer treatment? Surely your life is worth more than a mere posession? Sign here on the dotted line.
how is "harvesting" different from sourcing your products from any other means? If it's legal, then whats the problem?
"Someone actually bought one" …and that's the only reason needed.
"why wouldn't it be fair for doctors to require you to sign over your house to them to receive cancer treatment" …because there's plenty of other doctors that won't require you to do this.
If it's okay, then why is ticket scalping now illegal?
https://www.nsw.gov.au/news-and-events/news/new-laws-crack-d…
All I'm doing is buying hundreds of tickets and then immediately reselling them on ebay for 3x the price. It's unfair that someone stops me!
Now you can say 'ah, but that's illegal', but why is it illegal? That's the key question and why the law was passed.
Martin Shkrelli thought it was a great idea to price gouge a medication that few people had heard of and even fewer required:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Shkreli#Daraprim_price_…
The backlash was extraordinary and rightly so.
Here's a test for people saying it's okay to resell masks and sanitizer at greatly increased markups. 20x is not unusual. If you go to buy a product in a shop that costs $1 but discover it's all out of stock, but I'm sitting outside the shop after having just bought out the entire stock and am now charging $20 per item, are you going to think 'Well, this is the new fair price, this guy was here before me so obviously deserves the money'?
Martin Shkrelli thought it was a great idea to price gouge a medication that few people had heard of and even fewer required
Those people never paid more for their Daraprim, their insurance did and anyone of the few people who required Daraprim and could not afford it, had it given to them for free.
The extra money was to go into R&D or his shady private equity fund or something?
Here's a test for people saying it's okay to resell masks and sanitizer at greatly increased markups. 20x is not unusual. If you go to buy a product in a shop that costs $1 but discover it's all out of stock, but I'm sitting outside the shop after having just bought out the entire stock and am now charging $20 per item, are you going to think 'Well, this is the new fair price, this guy was here before me so obviously deserves the money'?
The guy is taking a risk holding all this stock, thinking the demand will continue to rise I won't just go to another shop that has it in stock.
@owli: "Those people never paid more for their Daraprim, their insurance did and anyone of the few people who required Daraprim and could not afford it was given to them for free."
Who pays for insurance? It's not the company. It's not the government. It's end consumers, as in you and me.
If anyone who couldn't afford Daraprim could just get it for free, wasn't raising the price of the product completely pointless?
"The guy is taking a risk holding all this stock, thinking the demand will continue to rise I won't just go to another shop that has it in stock."
The other shop doesn't have stock. No other shop does. Its all been bought out by guys sticking the product on ebay and Amazon. It's a free market.
The other shop doesn't have stock. No other shop does. Its all been bought out by guys sticking the product on ebay and Amazon. It's a free market.
So the guy speculated the demand would rise that quickly, put his capital at risk, he was right and is offering it to you if you can afford it. You should be grateful he is offering it and not sitting on it like a dragon sits on a pile of gold.
If he was wrong we'd all have a good laugh at him.
@owli: I should be grateful people are reselling products from Bunnings and Daiso at huge markups? No, I am completely ungrateful.
Your relative has COVID and is having trouble breathing. You arrive at your hospital's ICU ward to discover the nurses are running an auction on ventilators for who wants to breathe the most. How much are you willing to pay? Everything has a price, it's just a business model.
I could change maybe half a dozen words in your post and it would be the business model for the property market
You can always live somewhere else. If you need medical care now, there may be few or no alternatives. That's part of the reason why medical care is so expensive in the USA and if you don't have good cover from your employer most people are one serious medical condition away from bankruptcy. A for-profit run system.
Media has been reporting in US. amazon and ebay are cracking down, like this guy who is stuck with 17,000 bottles of sanitiser https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/14/technology/coronavirus-pu…
Poor guy, he's now going to have to either set up his own web site that few people will ever find, or sell individual bottles on Craigslist in parking lots. He knew the risks he was taking as part of his venture and now has to pay the consequences.
Nah he's just going to make millions now with lawsuits. Did you not know the US is the most litigious country in the world?
They basically hand you money if anything happens to you and it's somehow obscurely related to a product or service you purchased
Some online vigilante should do a public service, start up a burner ebay account and just stuff these profiteers around with loads of stupid questions, crazy bid prices for any auctions, buy up all the stock (taking down the listing) then bounce the payment meaning old mate the profiteer has to keep remembering to put the ad back up. Anybody that has bought anything from these guys should immediately raise a Paypal chargeback saying the paper was damaged.
The New York Times has a news article on this topic (Heading: "He has 17,700 bottles of hand sanitiser and nowhere to sell them") which tells how a number of eBay / Amazon sellers went on road trips to clear out stores of face masks and hand sanitiser, as they saw the coronavirus pandemic growing.
The article says: "Sites like Amazon and eBay have given rise to a growing industry of independent sellers who snatch up discounted or hard-to-find items in stores to post online and sell around the world… The bargain hunters look for anything they can sell at a sharp markup. In recent weeks, they found perhaps their biggest opportunity: a pandemic."
Explaining their actions, the sellers said they were doing "what they had learned to do: Suck up supply and sell it for what the market would bear."
While initial sales were good, Amazon then acted to block these resellers, leaving them with large amounts of these sought-after supplies.
Thus: "To regulators and many others, the sellers are sitting on a stockpile of medical supplies during a pandemic. The attorney general’s offices in California, Washington and New York are all investigating price gouging related to the coronavirus. California’s price-gouging law bars sellers from increasing prices by more than 10 percent after officials declare an emergency. New York’s law prohibits sellers from charging an “unconscionably excessive price” during emergencies."
There should be a law where 'in the public interest' the health authorities should be able to seize stockpiles and pay a normal 'non pandemic' wholesale price to buy them back. Particularly for things like facemasks and disinfectant it is in the public health interest to redistribute somebody's business venture stockpile. A law like this would immediately stop profiteering.
Exactly! That would be a good idea.
Thinking about it though, when old mate does it with hand sanitizer it seems evil, when OPEC does it with Oil prices or Big Pharma does it with medicine we all shrug our shoulders and reach for our wallets.
Whataboutism. Just because there are legally sanctioned monopolies (patents on pharmaceuticals) or cartels (OPEC) doesn't make price gouging by reselling cheap products are massively inflated prices okay.
This morning I read the same article of "17,770 hand sanitizers…" USA Ebay and Amazon are cracking down these types of sales. They should do the same in Australia.
I agree with you, it's OK to try to make a profit of buying something cheap and re-selling but not when there's a pandemic and there are hundreds of people who really need it and unfortunately may not be able to afford jacked up prices. It could be life or death for someone really sick. Hopefully he learnt a lesson.
eBay do have rules about proteering from disasters, however they dont actively police it (at all), they only shutdown accounts if someone points it out..
and, who wants to be that person :)
Many eBay sellers taking advantage during this time with overpriced goods.
Face masks especially and they are of bad quality that don't give protection
Ebay is just providing a platform. They take a %, the higher for them the better. Unless there is an uproar they won't change. Ebay having problems of their own (they are not growing).
nothing you can do, just don’t buy from them and enable that kind of behaviour
this is what you call natural selection at play
I'm selling 3M 9322a+ masks. Business is good
So over recent days we've all seen the madness that is the situation around toilet paper, sanitiser, wipes, etc…
You don't need to look far to find a few people who see an opportunity to make a quick buck on sites like gumtree and the like, however the good news is that their turnaround in taking these listings down is rather quick in my experience - I reported ~20 listings in my lunch break and they've all been taken down.
For those of you whose skin crawls when you see these listings, join the good fight, spend half an our or so a day scouring marketplace sites and report any blatant profiteers. It sure beats whinging on an internet forum :)
Lol you can't report people for pricing an item in a way you don't like.
Normally, I'd agree with that, but under these conditions it appears you can…
As an individual all you can do is put forward your opinion, but in the case of the listings I reported, the platform agreed that it was unreasonable.
That's just silly, you aren't the internet sales police. If you don't like the price, don't buy it. Didn't neg you by the way.
@brendanm: Nah that's all good, it comes with the territory :)
I don't see myself as some for of internet police, but I don't think I'm the only person who finds this behaviour a little morally questionable, especially given that the prevailing conditions result in a lot of people in need going without.
All I'm doing is suggesting that people use the (legal) means available to them to fight back against this sort of behaviour, nothing more, nothing less.
@Gronk: The most effective means to fight against pricing you don't like, is to not buy. They will just relist it, it's not hard.
@brendanm: In this climate - I'd argue that it's more effective to remove the sales platform and leave said seller out of pocket with a bunch of materials they can't sell.
@Gronk: If people aren't happy to pay the price, that's exactly what will happen. Your reporting does nothing except allow you to post on Facebook about how you are doing your part. The seller will simply relist them.
@brendanm: They probably will, but I (and hopefully a few others) will be back again tomorrow and the next day…
I don't use facebook ;)
@brendanm: I'd argue differently.
Rarity has an intrinsic value attached to it, but it is most certainly not normal for toilet paper to be rare in my opinion.
@Gronk: It isn't rare. I bought some 2 days ago (actually needed it). There are also many, many alternatives, it isn't like they are buying all the world's water and reselling it. What did people do before toilet paper was invented?
@Gronk: All that's doing is denying people who really need these products from being able to source them - because if they could get them elsewhere they wouldn't be on gumtree etc.
So congratulations, you get to feel good about yourself and someone who needed it so much that they were willing to pay high prices for them now can't access them.
someone who needed it so much that they were willing to pay high prices for them now can't access them
…because the store where they tried to buy this stuff had their shelves emptied by a small number of people who wanted to profit off the empty shelves at the store
@brendanm: For some people, not buying = getting sick. Whether that's actually or their own paranoia may be another story, but why should anyone have to risk an artificial shortage during a literal pandemic.
Your argument doesn't work with medical goods and similar necessities essential to survival, such as food and water. And to a lesser extent, essential utilities such as housing, electricity and transport.
Consumer power doesn't mean much if exercising it leaves you in a gutter wondering if starvation or infection will kill you first.
And you can't even live off the land without approval, and what if that costs money?
@crentist: What products are people selling on gumtree that I will get sick or starve if I don't have? I already pointed out that it doesn't work with water, but last time I checked, people on gumtree hadn't stolen the cities water supply, and were trying to sell it back to me.
people on gumtree hadn't stolen the cities water supply, and were trying to sell it back to me.
No they bought up your toilet paper and hand sanitizer supplies and are trying to sell it back to you. I was using water as a comparison for the purpose of explanation or clarification
What products are people selling on gumtree that I will get sick
or starveif I don't have?
If you don't understand the need for consistent hand sanitation during a pandemic, and/or avoiding contact with feces all of the time (even if it's your own), I hope you aren't shaking many peoples hands.
@crentist: I have a normal amount of toilet paper. My workplace has a normal amount of toilet paper. I wash my hands, I use this weird thing called "soap" and "water".
If I were to need hand sanitiser for some reason, if I can't buy it, I would simply make it.
I know what you were using water as, I already addressed it.
I agree, ebay can do better and we should all expect large companies to do better.