sorry you had a crappy experience! most sellers are pretty reasonable.

Okay, hopefully I'm understanding this all right. Please correct me if I am incorrect.

I checked out the deal both that you bid on and the buy-it-nows he set up later. First off, this is perfectly legit. Did you miss out on a good deal? Yeah, but it really wasn't the seller's fault. The seller does NOT have to watch their own auctions to see what price is driven up on a lot that is being bid on and then price other lots that are "buy it now" accordingly. I'm sorry, as an occasional seller myself, I just wouldn't have time for it. I'm not trying to be mean about it, but the seller really isn't in the wrong here. That's NOT the way eBay works.

Now, usually it works the other way around - the seller sets a buy-it-now for the price they would *want* to receive, and then they set up an auction that usually will go cheaper. But sometimes it backfires on the bidders and they end up bidding the price over. In this case, he had two different lots with different skirts in them and you bid up the earlier lot for a price YOU decided to pay. Cool. Then he set up the second lot for a price HE expected people to pay. Also cool. Who knows why he went cheaper, when obviously people were interested in his product enough to pay more for it.... maybe he has a lot of product he needs to clear quickly, who knows. *shrugs* You don't have a right to expect anything special or different from him. This is the way eBay works.

Now could he have been more polite and taken the time to explain how it works? Yeah. But if I were the seller and suddenly someone was demanding the difference between two separate bids in product - yeaahhhhh, I'd be a little "wtf?!" too.