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Close shave for Britain's eBay athlete
James Ellington of Britain (C) runs next to Nickel Ashmeade of Jamaica (L) and Jeremy Dodson of the U.S. (R) during their men's 200 metres heat at the IAAF World Athletics Championships in Daegu, September 2, 2011.
Credit: Reuters/David Gray
LONDON |
LONDON (Reuters) - A shaving company has come to the rescue of a British athlete who put himself up for auction on eBay to secure sponsorship for the London Olympics only to find the winning bidder was a hoax.
Top sprinter James Ellington thought he had raised 32,550 pounds ($50,000) through the website after receiving 71 bids from 45 interested parties in an auction that closed in December.
"Going on eBay gave me amazing exposure but unfortunately the winning bidder wasn't genuine," the 26-year-old Londoner said in a statement Tuesday.
"Thankfully Will King, the CEO of King of Shaves, stepped in and 'shaved' my life.
"I couldn't be happier the deal has been sorted ... now I can focus on winning a medal for Great Britain."
Ellington, a 100 and 200 meters runner, competed in last year's world championships in Daegu, South Korea but lost out on Olympic funding after enduring four years of injury problems.
Desperate to be in the running for his home Games, he had set a target of raising 30,000 pounds to provide him with enough to train and pay for travel, accommodation, kit and nutritional support.
In return he had promised to wear the sponsor's branded kit at every possible opportunity until after the Games which start on July 27.
King, who had contacted Ellington directly through Twitter to ask him to get in touch should the eBay deal fall through, has been involved before in Olympic athlete sponsorship.
In the 2006 Turin Winter Olympics his firm backed Britain's Kristan Bromley and Shelley Rudman in the men's and women's skeleton respectively, with the latter sliding to silver.
(Editing by Tony Jimenez)
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Anyway, as far as buying/saving $ and eBay goes:
If you send the seller a question about an item, find another of their listings, and send the question from that item page, rather than from the one that you actually want. This will add a little bit of work for the seller, if they want to add the question/answer to the item description page that you are actually interested in.
If you see an item that you want listed in auction format, send the seller a message asking if they will accept $x to end the auction early and sell the item to you. May be telling them that they would not have to wait as long to get their money (they would probably know that, but it still might help). If that does not work, use a sniping service such as Bidball.com to bid for you. It’ll bid in the last few seconds, helping you to save money and avoid shill bidding.
Use a site like Ebuyersedge.com to set up saved searches. You’d get an e-mail whenever a match is listed. Especially good for “Buy It Now”s priced right.
If the item that you are looking for is difficult to spell, try a misspelling search site like Typojoe.com to hopefully find some deals with items that have main keywords misspelled in the title. Other interested buyers might never see them. Then, if the item is listed an auction format, after a few days of no bids (hopefully anyway) send the seller and offer to end the auction early and sell the item to you. They may worry that no one is interested, and take whatever they can get.
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