doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Sellers on Gunbroker - What Gives?

Hi all, just wondering if this has happened to you. I have been looking on Gunbroker and other auction sites as well, for deals or whatever. I've asked questions on a certain gun(s) and some of the sellers are down right rude! Ask about weight and you get "I DON'T KNOW" (in caps) or ask about some other thing and you get "Can't you read the descrpition"

On the flip side some are nice, but for me at least they are more rude than helpful.

Has this happened to you?

All the best!

Greg

I have bought a couple of guns from the type of seller you describe. In both cases I believe the seller was covering up, obscuring, or creating a diversion so some flaw would not be found out or in hopes I would be too intimidated to return the gun. There are a lot more guns than I have money anyway so I have resolved to move on the next time a buyer is rude or unresponsive.

best,

Mike

Mike's last sentence says it all, and I agreee 100%.

If you sell many things on an auction site, you will find out after about your third day of doing it, that if your item is of any intrest at all, you get flooded with questions. Most of them were answered in the description, had the questioner taken less than a minute to read it.

before I started selling some things, I would wonder the same things as you do in your question in this post. Now I understand why that is the tone of the answers I still get to this day. For every real potential buyer, there are probably 20 tire kickers who will question you to death and never bid a penny over 20% of the fair market value.

Then you get the people that email you saying, "Hey I saw you are selling XXX. I have YYY and it is s laot better/not as good/like yours, except it is purple, and other equally valuable uses of bandwidth. Whay they think an anonymous selelr would want to talk to them is beyond me, but soem people feel the need to email total starngers just to chit-chat.

This is not to dissuade you from asking questions, only to help you understand what is usually going on. The odds of it being for some nefarious reason such as covering up or blurring the truth are usually low. Let your BS meter be your guide, not the tone of their response.

I am speaking from far much experience on both ends of the auctioning game. If you stick your nose in the air and say you won't buy something just because some one did not treat you like a king, you will be eliminatng a lot of very good buys. On second thought, I think that is EXACTLY what you should do. THat will leave more good buys for me!!!

I have experienced, as a seller, questions from a potential buyer that included one or more detail that was clearly spelled out in my description. However, being nasty to a potential buyer is not the way to do business. Just as being nasty to me is not the way to get me to be a buyer. I have also asked a question on rare occasions that was answered in the seller's description. I try to answer redundant questions politely and will not buy from a sell who is rude or unresponsive. When I ask what the LOP or drop at the comb and the heel is, "I don't know" is not a satisfactory answer. If it appears to be necessary, I'll tell the seller how to measure these things. Some people really don't know what we're talking about with these terms. Best advice, I believe, is to not buy from the rude, unresponsive person. Better still would be to tell him/her why you're not buying the item. Honest ignorance is not the same as rudeness. Ignorance is excusable and normal.

I've only purchased and sold a couple guns online, but the feeling I got on one occasion was that the gun I purchased, which awas really on the very low end of the value-spectrum, didn't get the full attention of the seller (who in this case was a more experienced "collector" who had a stable full of expensive guns), and consequently he didn't feel the need to go into excruciating detail about the POS clunker he was unloading for a song. It might have been a stretch for me, but it was chump-change just to make room for him--and consequently I got terse, single-syllable answers to only some of my questions. I don't think he was dishonest or intentionally unresponsive, just thinking "this gun is priced way below what it could be worth, why are you bothering me with all these silly questions--just buy the damn gun, you'll be happy with it." In the end I took the chance and was happy, but it really was hard to stomach at the time--a couple hundred dollars may not be a lot of money for some, but it's still a mortgage payment, a months worth of food, etc. I still don't understand why he couldn't or wouldn't put in the effort to describe the gun with enough detail to be useful either in the original description or the answers to my questions (and he DID know better).

I always try to be polite in my responses too. I know that some guys sell hundreds of guns a year on the net, and I can see how they are very short with their answers.

It all goes back to what has burned just about anyone who communicate electronically-at times it can be nearly impossible to judge tone by reading words on a screen. Very short answeres are required if you are fielding scores of questions each day. A potential buyer may read into it that the seller is jerk, when his intended tone was far from that. It is that he can only physically devote so much time to each response

Or maybe I just gives folks the beenfit of the doubt more than yall? At any rate, i don't let short and to the point answers scare me away from something good.

But I WAS serious before when I said I hoped it scared others away from bidding! Fewer bids means lower prices for me!!!

Sooner or later one seems to get all kinds of response when selling or buying. I have an interest in a gun in England advertised on a dealer’s web page. I wrote for information, nothing, wrote again, nothing. Got up at 4AM and called them, owner told me they delete all mail from the US because all they do is ask question but never buy. I ask for information and pictures, still nothing, time will tell.

I was selling stuff on Ebay at one point (not gun stuff) and it was pointed out to me by a friend that the people who ask questions rarely bid on that item. I don't know why but I found him to be correct.