.........

SonicScythe

.....................

ICBM

UnclePsychosis said:

ICBM said:

I haven't sold anything on Ebay for years and won't again, but now with all this sort of crap it isn't even worth the hassle of bidding on auction items. I don't even bother with Ebay at all now other than for Buy It Now when the price is OK.

Shame, it was once a decent site for both buyers and sellers.

The problem is massively overstated. I still buy and sell quite a lot of things on ebay and always pay attention to the bidding activity: very, very rarely have I come across the stuff being talked about here.

Probably. But I can't be bothered taking the chance of being dicked around by a troublesome or dishonest buyer when Ebay almost always sides with them and Paypal allows chargebacks months after the event, or wasting time being messed about by shill bidders and retractors and ending up being dishonestly outbid and then given a spurious 'second chance offer' at the absolute maximum I might have been willing to pay, when the next genuine bid is far lower. And I say that having made several thousand pounds buying and selling on Ebay in the old days, with only a handful of problems.

I know the risk is small - I work for a mail-order company too, and the problem buyers are few and far between… but in those cases we simply write it off as part of the cost of doing business. It's much harder to do that if it's your own stuff or money.

Dave_Mc

midlifecrisis said:

human nature in a lot of cases suggests someone will only bid if they see someone else bidding on it. ie they need confirmation and lack confidence that it is a good deal so once there is a bid, other bids pile in. which is why shill bidding works 

Yep, very good point.

stickyfiddle said:

grungebob said:

Winny_Pooh said:

grungebob said:

If your going to snipe never bid in whole numbers. Always add on an odd pence figure, this way the manual sniper has to add the same or more oddments in multiples of £1,£5 or £10 dependant on the value of the item. 

I don't get this, if a competing bidder bids anything higher regards of pence than the value shown to beat your bid then its sufficient.

Because at certain points of value the bids must increase in increments of say £1,5,10 etc. So if you bid say £35 and I bid £40.61 you now need to bid £45.61 at least, but if your sniped bid was at the next increment of £45 it'd be rejected at not meeting the minimum of the next bid. You'd have to refresh the page and add the extra which takes time, usually more time than is left on the auction if your manually sniping at the end. 

Correct, but if you actually bid the 45 you're prepared to pay rather than the 35 then you'd still end up as top bidder. It's only when entering your bid that you have to be a specific increment above the current winning bid. 

The only reason to snipe is because so many people don't understand that ebay automatically bids for them, and that the winning bid in any auction with multiple bids is *always* just a hair above the second highest.

People seem to forget that, even in a real auction, the final price is not necessarily the absolute max that the top guy would pay. It's the amount just above what the second guy would pay.

Yes, but if someone else bid £45, and you originally bid £45.61, then you win.

Putting in a non-round figure is a way to beat people who often do use round figures without having to bid up the minimum extra amount when you realise they've bid the same as you (usually an extra fiver or tenner).

Much as sniping avoids getting into a bidding war.

As far as I'm aware, at least.

Moe_Zambeek

I usually chuck in what I'm prepared to pay and leave it at that, when I see an item I'm interested in. Though to be honest, so much stuff ends early these days for off eBay sales i don't bother unless it's bin. If I want something I usually want it soon, not in 10 days+ when the auction actually ends.