They call it the eBay sting, and if you’re an ardent eBay buyer, then it’s probably happened to you. There is nothing worse than the feeling when you’ve been watching a product for days and the excitement grows as it nears the finish –poof, all of a sudden you get a horrible message on the screen telling you that the item has been removed. Then you’re left asking, can a seller remove an item off eBay before time is up?

The sad answer to this inquiry is, yes they can. It’s a blip that eBay has tried to avoid, but unfortunately there are only so many things that they can do. So if a seller claims to have made a mistake in a listing, or if the item is no longer available for sale – they are allowed to remove the item from eBay.

What happens in many cases however, is that as the sale is nearing a close, if the seller hasn’t earned as much money as they were hoping for, they remove the item claiming that it is no longer available. Theoretically, they aren’t truly allowed to do this, but eBay can only go so far in verifying the reason for the sale being terminated. So a seller can take an item off eBay before its time – it’s aggravating, but they can do it, and there’s nothing that you as a buyer can do to prevent it.

A number of eBay sellers source their products from the sale wholesale supplier, and they use eBay to create a competitive map of just how much their products should be selling for. If they don’t find the price they want however, they simply pull the listing and make adjustments to ensure that next time the final price will fall within the expected ranges that they have predicted by analyzing their competitors closing prices.

Of course, eBay is a bit of fun for the buyers that use it, but sellers take this method of forming a competitive map quite seriously and they certainly want to make a good profit on their wholesale cost when they are selling to their customers.

There are many different vehicles that sellers will use to initially decide which wholesale items to sell on eBay, and then also ascertain their competitive map of selling prices. The most basic tool, of course is the completed listings button which behaves as a guide for buyers so they know how much they should be paying, but it also is used by sellers to make certain that they will make a profit.

Another excellent tool is eBay pulse, which can be used to explore what the hottest products, search terms and most watched items are; more and more sellers are using this to refine their business activities and keep up to date with the latest trends. When it comes to selling wholesale products online, eBay can be your best helper, or it can be “buyer beware” since you can still be in for a small disappointment if the seller pulls the auction early.