How many sales per day on the 'goN? more:

1000 is doubtful. I'd think more like 100-200/day at most, given the current market.

your math and estimates are all wrong - there's no way to gauge satisfaction based on how many complaints you see. Agon clearly edits the forums with a heavy hand, so any serious rants are removed. Likewise with feedback - it gets sanitized quite often. Most stuff never gets to the dispute resolution stage (What a joke that is), and if it does, sanitization is the likely result anyway.

I've had probably 4-5 transactions I would call 'bad' to one degree or another. In most cases, it was mutually agreed not to leave feedback, or if negatives were left it was sanitized.

'My response was I never had a bad one...' - heh. just a matter of time. Sort of like your blissful ignorance of how bad Paypal is... sure, it's fine until something goes bad. They you are *HOSED*.

overall the community at Agon is pretty good however, much better than Ebay as a whole I think.

-Ed

Hi Ed,

Just curious as I think I've read that you are a dealer: Is your experience that there are more or less issues via AudiogoN or in the retail arena?

I totally agree with your eBay comparison. Much better here, IMHO.

Enjoy,

TIC

I've bought & sold a lot of audio gear/accessories and my feedback reflects it, so I would like to think my experience is typical in regards to the satisfaction level. I've only been burned once & the buyer was so lame I didn't pursue it, plus the fact it was only an outlet. My fault for sending it out before receiving payment but I had 12 or 13 perfect outlet sales plus all my other deals before.

I had one deal where the seller shipped some bookshelf spkrs. w/o adequate packing between the double boxes & what really pissed me off was I offered to pay extra for the extra box & related supplies. I didn't leave a neg. because the seller followed through immediately with full reimbursement.

Not too long ago I was in the process of selling my amp & the buyer and I couldn't agree on some fine points of the transaction, so I cancelled the deal & Express mailed his unopened envelope/check back to him after receiving. I also had one potential buyer who kept changing shipping & payment methods and simply walked away from that one after he told me he didn't want me to pack it but would send his "agent" to my house to pack & ship the piece. This wasn't a 5 crate spkr. system but a one box CDP!

A number of factors are required to successfully complete a deal, whether it be from A-gon or your local auto repair shop and I still like to make a phone call when I'm buying & encourage the same when selling. As for potential problems, there are many search engines & archives available elsewhere so that the diligent can check out a potential purchase beforehand.

Driver - good that you walked away from the deal with the buyer using his "agent"! That scam has been quite well documented here and over at AA.

The overall point I took from the AA post is that audiogon promotes a false sense of security, which given that audiogon deletes negative feedback and the perception that the dispute forum/process is meaningful is an arguable point. Audiogon has a minor role in transaction satisfaction. They have no real control, so to blame or praise audiogon for deals gone well or poorly is a mistake, imo. And we all have our own experiences, but they don't really mean much to other people.

Posters are not in a position to calculate satisfaction much better, but there are problems with Elizabeth's calculation. Primarily, as already stated, there are more buyers and sellers than posters, so not everyone who is unhappy is going to make a post about it. I think the number of problems is higher from looking at the dispute forum. Audiogon opened more disputes to the forum and it went up pretty quick, and I am confident in suspecting that even then audiogon handles the majority of disputes privately.

There have been notes of negative feedback deletions and complaints of dispute forum. The message is to buy and sell as if the dispute forum doesn't exist and that feedback to some degree is unreliable.