There's been a recurring theme among numerous disappointed sellers on Bring A Trailer that seems to be a uniquely BaT problem - and one they clearly have no desire of fixing. This issue, and the thousands of dollars it costs good, honest sellers, is one of the more disturbing aspects of online auctions, and it's high time sellers stop accepting it.
A thread popped up on the popular message board Lotus Talk ("My Bring A Trailer Nightmare"), wherein the now-former owner of a 1998 Lotus Elise S1 shared what amounted to a travesty of an auction. The thread is a year old at this point, but it warrants bringing up to the surface because the seller's experience is not unique. The abridged version is this: two commenters were allowed to question the car's legal, titled status (as it was a British-market import), which almost certainly introduced enough doubt to scare anyone off who had never dealt with such a car before. The commenters in question had no intention of buying or bidding on the car, and instead simply created a distraction about a non-existent issue. While BaT did strike some of the comments, the one that started the snowball effect - by a poster named "BiffNotZeem" - was allowed to stand, the gist of which was, "This one time, at band camp, the U.S. title provided with the vehicle wasn't the right one and the car was seized by the Feds and destroyed. The family dog was also killed in the process."
It was an utterly useless comment that I'm certain caused more than one bidder who have never dealt with an imported car to stop participating. One thing I've learned over the years is that I, personally, have a strong stomach for buying cars with no paper trails and figuring out how to get them legally registered. 98 percent of the car-buying population does not, and I have seen more than one car sold for scrap because of perceived title issues. Put simply, it's a big deal to most people, and one that will absolutely cause an auction to flatline.
To add insult to injury, the seller was unaware that BaT does you the "favor" of closing the gap between your (forced and low) reserve price to make the sale. When the car stalled out just shy of his reserve - a number he begrudgingly accepted because the BaT auction specialist told him it was sail past that number - he thought he would be able to keep his car and sell it privately. Instead, to his shock, he saw the car sold for a tick over the reserve. Car sold, and he left easily about $10,000 on the table.
To be fair, I have been surprised time and again to see the sale prices of some no reserve cars go far higher than expected. I will not sit here and say you can't create some legitimate buzz with a NR sale. However, when you combine forcing either NR or a very low reserve on sellers and then fail to stop commenters with no intention of bidding on your car from striking fear in the hearts of potential bidders, it's an absolute disaster for sellers. Had I been in a place to contact the seller of the above-referenced Lotus, I would have told him to keep his car and never engage with the high bidder, because a rash of no sales driven by sellers whose auctions were unfairly (and likely, illegally) damaged by bad actors in the comments section is the only way to force BaT to change.
I have seen more than one person defend the comments section on BaT as some sort of bastion of car auction free press, letting the market inform buyers and ridicule sellers about what they don't know. It's not: I guarantee you someone at BaT has figured out there's money to be made on auctions where the engagement spikes because of what's unfolding beneath the pretty pictures and boilerplate car details, and they have zero interest in helping clamp down the insurrection as it unfolds (if anything, they have likely figured out how to fan the flames to their benefit - an old newsroom saying, "If it bleeds, it leads", comes to mind). The intake team will roll out the red carpet for the 1 percenters and firebomb anyone who interferes with the auctions belonging to sellers of six-figure supercars, but for the rest of you, stop: take a moment to consider selling your car yourself, privately. Your bank account - and your soul - will thank you.