Some of you might remember my rant at a PLUG MUG about my negative dealings on Kijiji. One in particular, where the prospective buyer emailed me multiple times over a week about a watch I was selling, including a time and place of his choosing to arrange the sale, and then he never showed up or communicated again. Since then, I have had a number of other negative experiences with selling this watch, where a person was interested, offered me a lower price which I accepted, and then asked for a meeting but never followed through on my reply. I finally googled these kinds of behaviours on Kijiji, and it turns out that plenty of sellers have had similar negative experiences; some actually worse. I guess that this is human nature in the internet age; lots of people who have no consideration for others, but can hide behind the anonymity of Kijiji. (You can't rate sellers or buyers on Kijiji.)
Since there is nothing I can do about it, I decided that I'll just lower my expectations; it's still a good place to post because it's free and lots of people use it. It's interesting that up until I went to sell a watch, I never had any of these negative experiences. Because of the type of item, I have an alternative hypothesis to explain my experiences with a watch for sale. There may be a wholesaler or a pawn shop out there that wants to discourage private ads that could eat into their business, or even discourage me enough to sell the item at a ridiculously low price to them. A good way to do this would be to annoy the seller with pretend buyers so that they either stop posting or are softened up enough to virtually give away the item. It's easy to set up multiple accounts on Kijiji, and these could be used to give the impression of lots of pretend buyers. Any thoughts on this?
