3 Oct
2011
3 Oct
'11
11:59 p.m.
William Donzelli wrote:
I deal quite a lot in surplus -specifically antique
and collectable
electronics - and often have duplicates of items. Identical, often new,
never out of the wrappings. And yes, sometimes high ticket stuff. For
much
of it, I *dare* you to find differences in the
identical items. Sometimes
hundreds of items that were probably made within minutes of each other,
years ago. New pictures of every item is wasteful.
On the other hand, the seller has no way to know what characteristics of
the item are important to me as a buyer. I've bought things where the
seller indicated that the photo was the actual item being sold, bought
the item, received it, and found that it was actually not the pictured
item. In a recent case, the vendor/mask/date code of a chip on a board
were different, and those actually mattered to me. Maybe to anyone else
it wouldn't have mattered. If the seller hadn't stated that picture was
the actual item, I might have asked, but because he did, I believed
him. (Of course, if he was willing to lie in the posting, he might also
have lied if I asked by email.)
If an auction listing has a picture, and the picture isn't the actual
item, there should be an explicit statement of that fact. Otherwise the
auction listing is false advertising, and a buyer that is dissatisfied
with the item for not matching the photo has a legitimate complaint.
Eric