It appears a lot of new folk get fooled by Catawiki. Honestly, I did as well With EBay, Catawiki or any online sales platform, caveat emptor is always the defacto rule. The difference between Catawiki and places like Ebay is that Catawiki is presented to be a place where '187 experts' (as of writing) vet the things sold, whereas others do not. This gives unsuspecting folk a false sense of security. From what I have seen on Catawiki, this is not so ... and it appears a lot of their stock come in from markets not familiar to most here. Folks, don't be fooled! As always, do your due diligence, knowledge is power, especially when it comes to spending your money.
What annoys me most is their Unsubscribe link that doesn’t work at all and I’m still getting their email notifications
the only good thing about catawiki is that the competition level for bidding is not as much as ebay, but that could change sooner than later
My take on that is 1) they have a lot of overpolished badly relumed turds hidden by low-res unsharp pics (how I got bitten by them) from places like Turkey and Poland etc. And lots of redials. 2) The sellers want more than usual top dollar, so lots have reserves set too high, not much running from $1 up like in Ebay. Everybody loves a bargain. 3) Descriptions are usually inaccurate/misleading (and from the sellers, not the ‘experts’) 4) The ‘experts’ are not experts. In curing myself of Catawiki I found several incorrectly described (flawed) watches, which I wrote to them about. No response, no corrected listing etc. I am no expert either, but I know the extent of what I know and what I don’t. And I think knowledgeable folk see that. I have seen one or two exceptions to this, but only since curing myself of ever using Catawiki again.
agree for the most part, but then there are the exceptions, which are sometimes very special. I think in this preoccupation it pays to get to know the watches/brands first. And all your points are just as valid for ebay which has burnt all of us in one way. And yes, the so-called experts are more of a marketing strategy
Copied below is an older post from another thread that describes my Catawiki experience. It serves as an example of @eugeneandresson 's above caution. >>> My one experience with Catawiki was a complete turn-off. They listed a white gold Speedmaster early this year, so we're talking about a high value item. The listing had .jpeg images of 30-60Kb size that were useless for assessing condition, the description was only in Polish and after using Google Translate to make any sense of it, it contained around 10 words about the condition of the watch with the remainder largely irrelevant. Here's the translation: " The 18-carat white gold Speedmaster Professional Moonphase was only available for a limited time and commemorated the 30th anniversary of the Apollo XI landing in 1969. Only 2 thousand pieces were taken! I have been using it for many years and it was used only occasionally ... it has no damage or scratches ... the mechanism is fully functional ... the price is about 20 years ago 11000-12000tys.dolarow ... the hairpin itself costs about 1,200 euros! also gold! I think that today is such a backside that it is no longer on the market and its value only grows ... " Being interested, I emailed Catawiki to request some hi-res images and ask for clarification about the condition, as follows: Catawiki responded with the following email 4 days later: Based on above, I did not place a bid. The take-away message is Catawiki DO NOT handle the merchandise themselves. The seller takes the photos and provides the description. Catawiki's "experts" do nothing of any substance. Even for a high value item (10,000+ euro) they did not require the vendor to provide a detailed description and high resolution images, nor even bother to translate the vendor's Polish description into a language the broader buying market is able to understand.
Hehe, I wanted to say that. Only 2 of the 4 points stand for EBbay, and at least with EBay the high res-images are viewable by scrolling over the down-sampled originals, as well as you know EBay is the wild wild west, so caveat emptor is formost in the mind when looking. And don't get me wrong, I do not like Ebay all that much either...