Buyee Question :)

So I wanted to bid on a few things on YJA!, however as I'm using Buyee I am getting both messages:

 

"You can not bid on items from this seller."

 

and

 

"You can not bid on this auction because the seller has a low rating."

 

Now, I've used Buyee before and have successfully bid on a custom head and it was super fast and easy and I liked the way the process worked. And then a different time I wanted to bid on a different head and was unable to because of the same messages from above (I had been trying to bid on this new head about a day before the auction was to close). And then I went back to the auction page on Buyee about an hour before the auction was to end and suddenly the message was gone and I was able to bid.

 

I'm not sure why this happened.. but I don't really want to wait until the last minute on the things I'm currently trying to bid on and hope that magically the "you cant bid" messages go away. Has anyone else dealt with this? Or know why the messages pop up? Or know how to fix the problem? Haha.

 

I guess if worse comes to worse I can try to use a different bidding proxy. But I would rather not if possible.

 

Thanks in advance!

I've seen that message before, but all I can suggest is that they might limit bids with sellers they believe pose a high risk due to negative feedback. If the sellers feedback rating changed then that might alter your ability to bid. I think I read somewhere that some YJA sellers refuse up front to do business with proxies, but I don't know if that is true or not.

 

They are assuming a certain amount of risk due to them doing business with local merchants on your behalf.

 

I usually look for the least expensive option from among the sellers with no negative feedback to minimize my own risk. I realize that's not an option for unique items. I also know one unhappy customer doesn't mean a business is bad, but not being able to read the feedback its hard for me to evaluate the risk.

 

Sorry that's probably not much of an answer.

I encountered that error before when searching for Takane. The low rating is due to a "high" ratio of negative to positive feedback I believe. Thus, a higher risk of a poor outcome. The other error that you cannot bid on items from this seller, I'm not sure. The only thing I can think of is perhaps the seller doesn't support the payment method (bank transfer I believe) that Buyee uses. Perhaps Buyee (and other proxies) have a sort of agreement with various sellers? I mainly deal with eBay so some of Buyee and Y!J is similar. I've found a couple things on Buyee that I'm interested in buying that aren't even sold in the US.

I'd third the negative feedback as the reason. But I have seen some rare cases where the seller has blocked some of the accounts that proxy and deputy services use. Sometimes simply using a different service gets around it. That's unfortunate that it's not working though. I hope you're able to get what you're after in the end.

Unfortunately, both seller's I was looking at have 100% positive feedback so the case of the feedback being too low doesn't make sense >_< However it would make sense maybe that those seller's do not sell to Buyee. I used FromJapan instead to bid on them and it worked out fine, no error messages. I think I may have to switch from Buyee to FromJapan in the future if this keeps happening. The only thing I do not like about FromJapan is the lag between depositing and bidding, and I don't like having to deposit a specific set amount of money first, it makes me nervous! @.@

 

But thank you everyone for your helpful replies

I think I read somewhere that some YJA sellers refuse up front to do business with proxies, but I don't know if that is true or not.

 

I've had problems in the past where the seller had blacklisted the proxy account, which really is the opposite problem of what's described in this thread. Since I was using a reputable proxy service I can only assume that they were blocked simply due to being a proxy but I can't be 100% sure of course.

Yes, some Japanese sellers block proxies because they don't want foreign customers buying them. It's something that's well known (and widely experienced) in the garage kit community.