The eBay'd $29,100 Dodge Challenger SRT8 is still sitting at the dealer, who's alleging more shenanigans with eBay listings, saying the same loss-of-reserve issue happened with a Mustang too. eBay's found no faults and given us an official statement.
Earlier we looked into the case of the el cheapo Challenger and told you two sides of the story. Today we've got a third side to add — eBay's. We contacted eBay's PR team and had them look into what Glenn E Thomas Dodge is alleging — a fault in their system which allowed the reserve to disappear when they lowered the "buy it now" price down to $43,400. eBay looked into the auction and, no surprise, didn't find any problems, saying:
Lowering the Buy It Now price does not trigger the reserve price to disappear. There are no other reported cases of this happening. If the Buy It Now price is lowered below the reserve price, the latter is reduced to the same amount as the new Buy It Now price. The help pages on our web site provide more details around lowering a listing price: http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/lower_price.html. Not knowing the details behind how this particular listing was changed, we are not in a position to comment on the result of the transaction. As a marketplace, eBay brings millions of buyers and sellers together every day, and have guidelines in place to ensure transactions occur in good faith. We hope the buyer and seller reach a mutually beneficial agreement on this.
That doesn't end things though. When asked for comment about this statement from eBay, John Davis at Glenn E Thomas said this wasn't the only example of this happening. John claims at the same time the Challenger was up for sale, a used Mustang was also listed on the site and also had the reserve changed to $1 over the highest bid when they lowered the Buy it Now price. According to eBay this is not possible, if the Buy it Now price is lowered past reserve, the BIN price becomes the reserve. Glenn E.'s eBay dealership liaison apparently has technicians looking into the claim, and we've got eBay PR checking this latest assertion, so we'll see.
In any case, Alex went down to the dealership with a buddy, formally stated he was ready to buy the car at the auction price and went home with no car. We guess next we'll be calling up Chrysler to see what they have to say about this. We'll keep you updated.