Can my friends and family bid on my auctions?

A couple of years ago, I helped a friend get started as an eBay seller. She's built quite a successful business for herself since then, but she recently hit a speed bump when her auctions were cancelled and her account was suspended unexpectedly.

At first she didn't understand why, but further discussion revealed the reason—she'd had a relative place the first low bid on one of her auctions, "just to get the bidding started."

"That's a definite no-no," I told her. "What you did is called shill bidding. eBay won't let it go on if they know about it, and you'll find that they're surprisingly good at knowing about it."

It took her weeks of communication with eBay to get her account reactivated, but she's back online—and she'll never engage in shill bidding with family or friends again. It's a good lesson for any eBay seller to learn!