Andrew Miller signed baseball card

SUPER RARE 07 TOPPS FINEST ANDREW MILLER X-FACTOR #151


ended - Thursday, February 14, 2008

Auction grade: F

Starting bid: $220.00

Final selling price: $0 - no bids


Available here in this eBay auction is a 2007 signed baseball rookie card by Detroit Tiger's Andrew Miller. As to whether this is a rare card or not, I honestly don't know. I haven't looked at baseball cards for about twenty years. This criticism will be on the actual auction itself.

This auction is horrible.

First, the entire title (and subtitle) should never be in all caps like this one is here. Words like "signed", "baseball", and "rookie" should be used in the title for an item like this. Also, the seller misspells "awsome" and "peroid" in the subtitle.

The main body of text flat-out insults the buyers. There's a theory that the louder a salesman yells at you, the dumber he thinks you are. Notice how many low-end car and electronic TV commercials are that way. They actually believe you are dumb and they have to yell to get your attention. That's exactly what's happening here with this auction.

The entire text is in all caps and uses an unnecessarily large font. This is also one giant run-on-to-the-extreme sentence that's hard to read. Chat text is also used at one point (another big no-no). It's obvious the person didn't even bother checking their work when you see phrases like "BUY IN NOW", "CHECK OUT MY OTHER FOR OTHER RARE", and "GOODLUCK BIDDING".

This person is also misleading the customers by having two different cards in the blurry pictures, but only one of them is actually for sale in this auction. The other card is for sale in a different auction. Unless it's free or part of the auction, only have the actual item(s) for sale in the picture(s)!

These pictures need work. They are blurry and it's very hard to look closely without it hurting the eyes. Use of a small tripod or a flash will help reduce blurriness in pictures. It also helps to use a well lit area.

This auction needs an extreme amount of work for it to make it to an "acceptable" level. The only reason I didn't give it an "F-" was that the seller had the right idea by taking front and back pictures of the baseball cards. The execution sucked, but the right idea was there.

It's obvious that the seller doesn't know how to spell certain words and doesn't care about making a neat and easy to read auction. I took a look and saw similar problems in the seller's other auctions. The seller could be making a lot more money by actually taking the time to improve their auctions and not appearing to be a total idiot.

Why should I give my hard earned money to somebody who doesn't care and insults my intelligence?

I do take satisfaction knowing that the seller spent extra money by A) having a gallery image, B) having a subtitle, C) having a gift icon, and D) having a high starting bid. It's not a whole lot of money, but all of those auctions do add up over time.