Gus Landt wrote in noble knight games ebay practices:As of about 2 years ago, we try to take individual pictures of anything $500+. In the case of the auction being discussed here, the pictures in the auction ARE of the actual item.

A buyer has no way to know this.

Gus Landt wrote in noble knight games ebay practices: The "All pictures are stock photos" in the auction is template boilerplate that I haven't had the time to dig into the coding for (As the sole programmer, I only have so much time to work on the million things that need doing). I need to figure out how to overwrite that boilerplate when we send actual images.  :?

As a fellow software person, I can sympathize with being caught between irate users and (hypothetically) indifferent management. As a buyer of collectibles, I have no sympathy at all. None. Your circumstances do not excuse these practices and as you can see from this thread, it is most definitely affecting NKG's business. In your position I would take this thread to NKG's management/owners and make the case for getting the resources/bandwidth to fix this situation, but that's just me.

Gus Landt wrote in noble knight games ebay practices:As grubbiv points out, you can see that on our website - we show a stock photo as usual, but we also have 3 pictures of the actual item.

Again, a buyer has no way to know this. I'm also very skeptical that eBay's ToS are permissive when it comes to sellers suggesting their users should be navigating to other sites that also happen to sell the same items.

NKG is either relying on lazy/ignorant buyers, or they're secretly hoping to direct traffic to their website (but know they're not allowed to say that outright), or they're just requiring that savvy buyers reach out and ask for the missing information for every single item. There is no way this is an efficient use of resources, despite what you suggest below about all the grading training NKG employees may receive.

Gus Landt wrote in noble knight games ebay practices:As for pricing, we simply aren't interested in competing on price. We've never been interested in being the cheapest around. As many have pointed out in this thread - we stand by our products and we generally do a good job grading. When you have 20+ people cataloging products, not all of them are always going to grade everything the same.

I'm not thrilled with NKG's pricing but that's beside the point I'm trying to make here. Waiting for a motivated buyer is entirely the prerogative of the seller. Don't let price complaints (or complaints about other sellers) distract from the core issue here: an indifferent, seemingly predatory attitude toward your eBay customers.

Gus Landt wrote in noble knight games ebay practices: We don't just shrug our shoulders on that though!  We actually put a fair amount of resources into training new catalogers AND in reviewing and re-training existing catalogers to all be consistent. It's an ongoing process though.

It sounds more like the IT department is offloading resource expenditure for all the unanswered questions onto the customer support department - and in doing so, irritating both the buyers and the customer support reps. (I can hardly believe they're happy to be answering the most basic questions for every eBay auction.)

Anyway, thanks for replying in this thread - this definitely answers my question about what's going on with NKG's eBay auctions.

One would have thought, given the Covid situation, retailers as a whole would be keen to improve their online sales operations.