Even though they haven’t made an official announcement on the announcement board, eBay is set to eliminate the pre-approved bidder program as of January of 2007.
Attention: Beginning in January 2007 access to this feature will be restricted. Prior to the restriction time you will be able to use the feature, but once the restriction takes place you will not be able to add or remove any buyers from the pre-approved bidder list for the item. For other buyer management tools go here.
According to a few posts on the eBay message boards, one of the main reasons for the change is the use of the pre-approved bidder program as a way to collect emails. Buyers would encourage potential bidders to email the auctioneer to be added to the list and would then find themselves on a spam email list.
I would also think that this could be a part of eBay’s revamping that begun with changes to fees in the store structure. As you can imagine, a closed, pre-approved bidder auction isn’t conducive to eBay making as much as possible on final values and other bidding intensive fees.
[tags]pre-approved bidder,ebay,announcement,message boards[/tags]
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