BMW dealers refuses to honor Ebay bid on '08 M3

[onewhippedpuppy]

............great thread.

[Jims5543]

Ummmmm......

[Neilk]

WTF??? Check out this link

Topic says it all.

latest update:

"Everyone, thanks again for all the kind words, and above all the support you have give me. I cant thank everyone enough. I hope to have some sort of an update on the direction of this thing by 12 PM PST today.

That said, please refrain from calling/contacting the dealer, BMW of Lincoln to voice your opinion on this. Fil has indicated people have been harrassing him, and that is not cool. I understand many people are upset, but please refrain for now.

Thank you

Ken"

[onewhippedpuppy]

AKA, why I hate ebay. They put a friendly facade on the buying process, and depict it to be safe. In reality, they have no teeth whatsoever, and cannot actually enforce any of their rules. A shady car dealer is a shady car dealer, ebay or no. On the upside, I'm happy to see the HUGE amount of negative PR BMW of Lincoln is receiving. No doubt this has/will cost them multiple sales, and far more than the few thousand they stood to lose on the M3. Hopefully in the future they will conduct their business with a little bit of integrity.

[89911]

A local record dealer tried to sell his entire collection on Ebay. Someone out ot the country with 0 bids bought it for the opening amount of 3 million. Turns out he wasn't even registered and the deal fell through.

[89911]

http://idolator.com/359836/huge-record-collections-alleged-buyer-may-be-getting-some-very-negative-ebay-feedback-soon

Here is the article

[Soterik]

They appear to have a pretty decent sized board over there... right now there's about 175 people on the tech site, and we have about 250 on our 911 tech site right now.

However.... right now there are over 2300 people viewing that one thread over there, and it has over 214,000 individual views.

I read a few of the pages...it's literally around the world to most every car board you can imagine.

Talk about negative press for that dealership...

Eric

[Joeaksa]

Hope that the dealership does the right thing. They really screwed up on this one!

Joe

[the]

Really a series of super-idiotic moves by the dealership.

There was obviously no "mistake." They were carefully monitoring the auction, changed the BIN price during the auction, etc. They advertised it expressly as the "LOWEST PRICED M3 ON EBAY." Clearly, they put a relatively low opening bid of $60K, on the gamble that they would get at least 2 bidders to bid it up. They lost their gamble, and now they are crying about it? For what? They probably still break even (or very close) on the sale, and it's one car. My guess is that dealership makes a net profit of $2 million + per year.

Someone (or more than one) over there should definitely get fired over this.

[Porsche-O-Phile]

The lesson to the dealership will be that they should do like all the other dealerships on Ebay do - make sure you get a shill to bid up the price so you don't get f*cked.

[Rot 911]

Ebay doesn't care what buyers or sellers do.

[Porsche-O-Phile]

Originally Posted by Kurt V

Ebay doesn't care what buyers or sellers do.

Correct. The only thing they care about is the swift and efficient collection of fees. Beyond that, in my experience they couldn't give less of a rat's ass. Paypal is just as bad.

[Dave L]

Originally Posted by Porsche-O-Phile

The lesson to the dealership will be that they should do like all the other dealerships on Ebay do - make sure you get a shill to bid up the price so you don't get f*cked.

somewhere in the tread this is discussed. Apparently one bidder was bidding on on the dealers auctions, everything from a GTO to 3 BMW's. Apparently the shill bidder was asleep at the wheel when it came to the M3.

[Joeaksa]

Originally Posted by Porsche-O-Phile

Correct. The only thing they care about is the swift and efficient collection of fees. Beyond that, in my experience they couldn't give less of a rat's ass. Paypal is just as bad.

Assume that you know that Ebay owns PayPal?

Yes, they are worthless as tits on a bore hog.

I attached my AmEx card to my Pay Pal account. Its the only way that I can get anything done in the event of a dispute. AmEx will stand up for the card member, while Ebay/PP could care less.

[slodave]

It looks like the guy may get the M3 at the winning bid price. He says he will meet with the dealer tomorrow to work out the details.

[Porsche-O-Phile]

The guy lives in Palos Verdes - wonder if it's anyone we know. . .

If I were him, I'd take the car for $60k and then immediately turn around and sell it (on ebay, preferably) with a reserve of $75k. He'd easily get it - especially with the story surrounding it now. He could go buy a comparable M3 elsewhere for $68k-$72k and walk away with money in his pocket.

And he'd get to extend a middle finger to the dealership. Bonus.

Then again, I'm just kinda' vindictive like that.

[Overpaid Slacker]

Jeff --

Nobody's ever accused me of math skillz... but if he finances the $60k (which he said he did), sells the car for $75, he's got $15. If he then buys a car for $70k and puts down $15k, he finances $55k. That's not "money in his pocket".

yeah, he could finance the $70 and keep the $15k "in his pocket" while paying probably about than in P&I over the course of the now-$10k-higher financing.

I'm sure a time-value-of-money guru can convince me he'd come out ahead... but if you torture numbers enough, they'll confess to anything.

I would like him to stick it to the dealer, though! Even though the dealer's already stuck it to itself. My cousin had a similar (but not quite as extreme) issue with a VW dealer in New Hampshire, and the blowback from the VWVortex forums got VW North America crawling up the dealer's a$$!

JP

[Porsche-O-Phile]

OK I get your point, but he'd be saving versus what he was willing to spend. He's essentially gotten the car discounted and he's more likely to stay "right side up" on his loan. But yes, you're correct, he's spending money and therefore it's not "money in his pocket". Wrong choice of words on my part.

[Overpaid Slacker]

Things just went from bad to apocalyptic for the dealership: It's now linked on Fark.com.

Somebody is getting wikkid fired over this!

JP

[Neilk]

The dealer said they would sell him the car at the Ebay price WITH CONDITIONS. I bet some of those conditions are that he can't resell it immediately.