You can't actually specify reserves less than £50 now iirc. Hence if you want a minimum amount for something you need to specify it as a starting price. (ebay gets more from listing fees that way since they charge more for higher starting prices)
I know this may sound conspiracy theory but there is something strange on the auctions yesterday ( with the plate I wanted and others like it).
I checked the past (completed) auctions for prices as was suggested.
Of all the plates over the last few days ( all the same one - remeber I said it was common enough) there are several not bid on at all ( mostly those over £6.50) .
All those yesterday when I bid have gone for £4.99 ( except the one I got sniped on which had to rise to £5.19) and the buyer has been the same dealer each time. In two other instances he over bid another bidder ( not me).
But at the same time there is a whole raft of plates he didnt bid on and which didnt get sold - so why did he have to bid on plates with bids on and not those without?
Today, I have bid for a plate ( because I now know the rules ) and got it for the entry price. No other bidders.
But yesterday was so odd - he bid on all those with another bidder it seems and left the un bid ones alone and unsold as well as the high priced ones. It was the same dealer each time and only him who did the over bidding. Go figure that
So what's the problem? IF they don't sell then they've lost money. If they do then the prices aren't "inflated", they're what that segment of the market will bear.
Now here is where conspiracy theories do actually hold more water - what you may have seen is shill bidding.
A shill is either another bidder working with the seller, or more commonly the seller with another account, bidding to raise the final selling price of their items. Its against ebay T&Cs and if you susspect its happening then you can report the user names to ebay to investigate.
Good. It does happen - especially with more common items. Sometimes just waiting until the current surge in demand is sated and then bidding can work well...
(I have bee caught out as a seller like that - I watched a number of auctions where people were fighting over an item, a hence decided to sell mine. Put it in at a low start price, confident it would be bid up to silly money again, only to have it go for next to nothing because everyone who wanted one had already got one!)
Report them to ebay if it looks dodgy. Blatant shill bidding is fairly easy to spot, more subtle work using teams of bidders is far harder. (in fact even harder than it used to be since ebay now obfuscates the bidder names)
How would you know? Would have have "if no one's bid for ten minutes it's sold", or what?
As an example, have a look at:
And that makes it worthwhile, since it is impossible to bid on a series of items on eBay with the intent of acquiring one and only one of them.
I have used bidnapper for exactly that purpose, too.
firefox / Tools / Addons get Addons MyIbay auction bid sniper
[g]
If you don't then Paypal will refund your money.
(to be fair, things not turning up is very rare - only happened to me once and it seemed like a genuine loss in transit. It was from a commercial seller, and he was happy to send another - so nothing lost in the end)
Well there is the possibility of someone shilling for a dealer - and every now and then they presumably end up buying the thing by accident. Hence it goes back into the auction again.
There is also stuff which a dealer may think might be valuable, buys it, and discovers it was nothing remarkable, and so flogs it again, to cut their losses.
Advanced search will actually let you search for stuff within a certain distance of your location - can be handy for big heavy stuff.
Yup, ebay is a very good place to look for stuff made from unobtanium. Its a viable way to market rare slow moving stuff that would be a waste of shop space in any other business.
It could be that he has watched the market for some time, and knows that there is ongoing demand for these, but they only tend to come up for sale in batches. Hence in six months time there will be fewer on offer and he will get his money back. He might also have them sat in a shop window, or on a market stall etc in the mean time. Hence he is just boosting the chances of picking up a sale in the mean time.
Anything new is going to feel a tad uncomfortable at first. You may find with time as you get more experienced, you find benefits as well as downsides.
If you are buying new items from a business seller, then its no different from ordering online from screwfix etc.
Just accept there are different categories of ebay seller. There are folks like you and me who will use it to flog off unwanted stuff from time to time. We are now very much in the minority. There are outright crooks and con men selling moody / non existent gear - same as any market place. There are full time ebay traders - they make their living mostly selling on ebay - usually with stock acquired in the same way as any commercial shop/wholesaler etc gets their stock. There are also the "clicks and mortar" sellers who have an existing business and use ebay as just another web outlet - either alongside their own (e.g. Transtools, Axminster), or instead of setting up their own e commerce site (like Marshal and Parsons tool merchants in Southend).
Do you buy your spuds from a supermarket, or go looking for the farmer who grew them?
Na its nothing personal - Steve is nasty to everyone ;-)
Huge gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:
I use esnipe.com - which has the same concept of "auction groups", but is a totally cloudy service, meaning that as well as being platform- agnostic, it isn't reliant on your internet connection or clock to place the bid.
And don't bid straight away, wait until shortly before it's due to end but without going to the extreme of sitting at your PC at the very last minute. Although it won't make any difference if anyone else has put in their maximum price it will reduce the chance of the final selling price being ratcheted up by people who are unaware of the auto bid mechanism and keeps manually putting in a series of bids just 50p above the latest advertised bid.
You used to be able[1] to cancel bids (probably with a limitation of not less than 24 hours from the end of an auction) so you don't have to end up with two.
[1] ie Can't be bothered to see if it's still possible.
AFAICS, it isn't. At least other than immediately with the "Oops, I clicked in the wrong place" excuse.
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