Sorry to hear about this turn of events.

Not to sound like a lawyer, but it is surprising that eBay allows this . . . and, come to think of it, I am a lawyer!!

When you hit the BuyItNow and then paid for the watch, I believe that you had a binding contract with the seller to purchase the watch at $4,800.

Not surprising that it is difficult to enforce this contract, but it is surprising that eBay encourages this sort of behavior by allowing the seller to relist. I suppose that it's all about the fees, from eBay's perspective.

So what would have happened if we had colluded in the second auction to bid it up to $24,800 . . . hard to believe that seller would not have had some recourse against the high bidder. Perhaps the only recourse is the negative feedback, but I have always been under the impression that eBay auctions do result in the formation of binding contracts.

Jeff

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

: Yes, I had gotten lucky and did the BIN, and paid immediately
: after. He then decided to cancel the auction a few hours later
: to my surprise, without any warning. As you can imagine, I was
: not very happy with this, but given eBay's limited (very
: annoying) ability to do anything about it, he was able to relist
: it again as an auction.

: Life goes on!