It's so annoying to do a Price highest first search for Lap Steel or Steel Guitar and see 10 of their stupid auctions at the top of the list.

One factor here is that it is being sold by a Guitar Center guy. That may have scared off some legitimate buyers, given GC's shaky reputation on eBay.

here's a basic reply :

received your message in the Instrument Exchange message center.

Rest assured, Instrument Exchange is not a scam. This is a very reputable company.

Instrument Exchange represents thousands of music retailers around America that use our software and services to sell at eBay and Instrumentexchange.com. We hold the $ in escrow until the buyer receives the item and is satisfied. When the buyer has accepted the sale, we then go ahead and pay the seller.

We are here to protect the buyer. Since you are a musician, I would recommend that you give IE a try. We have had over 100.000 successful transactions.

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I think the situation we have with a number of Folks (including myself), is recognizing quite well that IE has a notoriously bad reputation to live down even if they are trying to "change their ways", which I don't have anything other than their own rhetoric to determine if they are; And some of their new separate stores' ebay accounts are already showing declining feedback scores that are an affront to the IE claims in their email sent to Crowbear. Case in point is the rather deceptive email Crowbear got that fails to mention that GC and IE are one in the same and that the vast majority of those 100,000 sales are of their own inventories ...and since the new stores' accounts haven't existed very long, most of that 100,000 sales likely include the old IE ebay account that crashed because of highly questionable practices and notoriously bad ebay feedback. If someone is not honest and forthcoming in the obvious matters at hand ...(Sir, we apologize for problems we had in the past and are making every effort to ensure they don't occur again ... etc)... then there is a reason for it, and I don't trust such rhetoric any further than I can spit.

Now this surely doesn't mean that all GC employess, nor even certain stores and store managers are complicit in bad business practices, ...and by simple odds and common sense we can assume that many are quite good people. But that doesn't negate the fact that IE has a notorious reputation and IE/GC are quite aloof in revealing their direct relationship with each other, even during the times that the previous / defunct IE ebay account acquired such a bad reputation. With their past reputation as a basis I think it fair to watch their auctions, feedback and practices etc very closely.

A person might also want to take notice in the bowels of the IE website, that GC inventory that is up for auction is also available for a direct sale at the store that holds that item; ...and I've also noticed in their auctions that they suggest bidding your hightest BECAUSE they can/will take in-store offers as well; ...And, per GC's past practices, an item at one store can even be drop-shipped to a customer in a purchase at a different store, because most if not all of their stores share a common database of their system-wide inventory for that purpose. I believe I'd rather to business directly with a store of good reputation than with an unknown store in an ebay / IE auction.

One plus is that knowing who and where the point of sale is with GC / IE, ...a person has a much better bag of tools to hold their feet to accountable and regulatory fire should a deal go bad; Certainly much better than appealing to ebay's stonewalling hands-off / hear-see-speak no evil architecture.

Aloha,
DT~

[This message was edited by Denny Turner on 25 April 2005 at 07:53 PM.]