I have been a regular buyer / seller on your site for a number of years. Recently, however, I have begun to doubt your company's sincerity. This is because each time I bid on an item I get the following message: "You're the highest bidder on this item. Hope you win it." This statement doesn't really appear to be open to misinterpretation and therefore I can only assume from this that you are explicitly stating that you want me to win the item. This leads me to only two possible conclusions.

The first is that you genuinely do want me to win every item I bid on. I'm not really sure why this would be. Firstly, if anybody else bids higher than I have on the item, this means it will sell for more and therefore your end of auction fees will be higher, resulting in more money for your already thriving business. Secondly, I don't know why you would take such a preference to me as an individual so as to want me to beat every other eBay user in any auction I ever bid on. If I'm honest, this would actually creep me out a little bit.

The second possible conclusion is that you say this to everybody who bids on an item on eBay. If this is the case, I can't help but feel slightly annoyed about this as it would mean either you're lying to me when you tell me that you hope I win the auction, or you change your mind about who you are 'rooting for' depending on who is winning the auction. I suppose the term 'glory supporter' would be particularly apt in this case. This also means that when I'm selling an item you're telling each bidder that you don't want anybody else to bid any higher on my item, which doesn't seem very supportive to my hopes of making a sizeable profit on my antique biscuit tin.

Please could you therefore enlighten me as to which of these conclusions is correct? Am I your favourite eBay user or are you consistently lying to people?

Yours sincerely,

Ben Jameson

P.S. Upon showing this letter to my good friend Crispin, he pointed out that as you haven't used the words 'I' or 'we' before the word 'hope', you may actually simply be instructing eBay users to hope they win. I did of course tell Crispin to shut up and stop being stupid.