Bluie

Has anyone had experience with bidding on e-mail.

I've followed a few items and bidded, after the cut off, looked at the bidding history to find on a few occassions that an individual has bid 3 or 4 times in a row, effectivily out bidding themselves. Sometimes going on to 'win' the item.

Being cynical is this a way of hiking up the price?

S55 HOT

No

You can't hike the price all by yourself - eBay doesn't let you waste money like that eBay works on the principle of bid increments (which change depending on the value), but for simplicity, say £2. If the highest bid is £50 and you come along & bid £100 it will sit at £52 on you. If someone else then comes in at £60, it will automatically bid for you and so will sit at £62 in against you etc etc.

Can be a bit weird at first coz you can bid higher than the highest displayed bid and be immediately out bit.

If someone is repeatedly bidding, then they are only affecting their upper limit, sometimes this is just to increase their limit in case another bidder joins in, but usually it;s because there is a higher bid entered earlier and they are being automatically out bid and it takes several attempts to come out on top.

The theory is that you should just enter your maximum bid & let eBay do the rest for you.....but somehow almost everyone (including me) get a little carried away and bid more than once for things you want.

If you bid on the item or addit to your watch list, you will be able to see the actual bid history after the sale has finished. The only thing you can't see is how much the winning bidder was prepared to pay (ie their max bid), only the winning amount.

It can be interesting watching auctions, some items find their price quite quickly then stay there for days, other items do nothing & then go mad in the last hour.

Worst thing from a buyers perspective is a bidding war, so my tactic if I really want something is to wait until the last 30 seconds then go in as high as I dare - your "opponent" has no time to react and you will only have to pay 1 increment higher than their ceiling.

BTW - only buy from people with a good history - click on the number in brackets to see the comments & you can also go in & see the items traded. If you're bidding for a high value item, make sure the history reflects that, its easy to build up a history buy buying a few cheap items - doesn't make you trustworthy to sell items for £'00's... Be very careful with foreign sellers & NEVER use Western Union transfers - you might as well put cash in an envelope & stick it in the post ! A few sensible precautions & you should be fine - I've made over 100 transactions and never a problem.

Al

Bluie

Al

Thanks very much for the reply, it all makes sense I think.

Cheers

Nick

stevencotton

"bid sniping" as it's called is a real pain in the ****, annoys me when it happens. I knocked up a little perl script which sits on a server with mucho bandwidth, reloads the item I'm interested in every second and tells me its status. If any of those scrotey bid-snipers try to outbid me right at the end and I *really* want the item they don't stand a chance, I see their snipes in real time and can easily counter, I can still outbid them even with 1 second to spare

DarkForce

Putting a bid slightly higher can also work too - i.e. If you're wanting an item but only will to pay say £100, make your max bid £101, or £100.50 - something like that. Then if the person you're bidding against goes up to £100 at the last minute, you can still spite them

Chris

stevencotton

Yep, you'll see people doing that a lot. I was bidding on a Mire Mare cassette case last night, was winning with 102 quid before the seller stopped the auction 24 hours early, I think people also make silly private offers to buy before the auction closes :/

camk

http://www.auctionsniper.com/default.aspx

is all you need to know and all you need for effective sniping. Very very effective.....took me a while to work out why so many people were managing to bid in the final 30 seconds and beating me.

Regards
Cammy

supertouring

I think the only way to outbid yourself is as follows:

Example:

You bid 10 for an item where the increment is 2
Other person bids 9 still leaving you as the highest bidder
but you are only 1 ahead of them
But you want this item so you bid 15 just in case
I think Ebay will move your bid to 11 i.e. an increment of 2 ahead of the next highest bid.

I have seen this on a 500 quid item where it cost the guy another 12 pounds for bidding against himself.

Ebay is great, but you can spend a lot of money on it. I also do not bid more than I can afford to loose if the transation goes sour. So far, in about 100 transactions, not one has.