Early Ebay bidders...

Benjamin Hall

Who are these people? Do they do it just to push prices up. Idiots!

pastey_boy

Benjamin Hall wrote:

Who are these people? Do they do it just to push prices up. Idiots!

so what should everybody do ? bid in the last 3 seconds. at least if some people bid early on it means you have some chance of registering a bid in the dying seconds.

Buckled_Rims

No, it's called tactics that pay off extremely well in some cases. By putting an early bid in, it takes away the "zero" bid count that some bargain hunters search for. I've also used it as a reminder. I just bid £3.51 for a pair of glasses, I can then get updates of any other bids on my mobile to keep me informed.

If you don't like it, don't bid or put an item in an auction

willowthewhite

Also I believe that once someone has put a bid on, the seller then can't change the auction to a buy it now

Buckled_Rims

willowthewhite wrote:

Also I believe that once someone has put a bid on, the seller then can't change the auction to a buy it now

Yeah you're right. Actually I think there's a few other things the seller can't do such as put a reserve price on.

Anonymous

I'm an early bidder, three reasons-

1- I get updates
2 - I just bid the max I'm prepared to pay and don't get drawn in. Sometimes seeing an early bid puts people off casual bids, I've had some tremendous bargains this way. e.g. a Colnago C50 with full campag chorus and deda finishing kit for a grand.
3 - Seller can't fettle the description/reserves etc...

petemadoc

NapoleonD wrote:

I'm an early bidder, three reasons-

1- I get updates
2 - I just bid the max I'm prepared to pay and don't get drawn in. Sometimes seeing an early bid puts people off casual bids, I've had some tremendous bargains this way. e.g. a Colnago C50 with full campag chorus and deda finishing kit for a grand.
3 - Seller can't fettle the description/reserves etc...

Hmmmmmm, never thought of it this way before, I've always been a last 3 seconds bidder. Might put more thought into it in future.

I missed out on a bargain the other week because I didn't bid enough in the last 3 secs. A full carbon 2010 Bianchi with sram force and ksyrium elites went for £820! Damn you ebay I should have bidded more and earlier :twisted:

Teach

PeteMadoc wrote:

NapoleonD wrote:

I missed out on a bargain the other week because I didn't bid enough in the last 3 secs. A full carbon 2010 Bianchi with sram force and ksyrium elites went for £820! Damn you ebay I should have bidded more and earlier :twisted:

I usually put an early bid in, usually my max and maybe an extra £5 and a silly bit. So if you were placing £820 I would probably place £826.23, it usually makes the next bid at least £831, which seems significantly more than £820. If you'd bid earlier you might be the proud owner of a carbon fibre Bianchi.
What is your problem with the earlier bids. Surely when you bid you know the max you are going to spend if it's £820, why does it matter if it is placed on day 1 or in the last 3 seconds, apart from it can be very exciting in the last three seconds!

tobermory

well somebody's got to start the bidding

guinea

I really wish that ebay didn't publish the exact end of an auction, or added a few minutes every time a bid is accepted.

As someone who sells far more than he buys on ebay in terms of value, I get annoyed by the fact that an item doesn't move until the last 5 minutes. I don't have any idea how mush I'll get or even it it will sell. Then some poor sod, who may have given me more cash, gets sniped at the end.

If the end of an acution was a bit fuzz then the maximum price will be attained and more people would be happy.

bails87

Ebay would work much better if people did what they're supposed to and went straight in with their maximum bid. Ebay then does the incremental bidding for you, I don't get why people put in one bid at a time, then moan when they lose out.

Buckled_Rims

guinea wrote:

I really wish that ebay didn't publish the exact end of an auction, or added a few minutes every time a bid is accepted.

As someone who sells far more than he buys on ebay in terms of value, I get annoyed by the fact that an item doesn't move until the last 5 minutes. I don't have any idea how mush I'll get or even it it will sell. Then some poor sod, who may have given me more cash, gets sniped at the end.

If the end of an acution was a bit fuzz then the maximum price will be attained and more people would be happy.

Er, isn't that the whole principle of an auction?

I'm not a fan of ebay (I've only got 60 odd points) but an auction is a gamble for the buyer and seller. An auction is just that, you take a chance. If you want a fixed price, there's a facility in ebay to do that or go to a selling rag like Loot.

guinea

You can't put a max bid on several items if you only want one.

Bidding your max bid on three items runs the risk of you winning all of them. Not good.

Barteos

NapoleonD wrote:

I just bid the max I'm prepared to pay and don't get drawn in.

This.

Buckled_Rims

guinea wrote:

You can't put a max bid on several items if you only want one.

Bidding your max bid on three items runs the risk of you winning all of them. Not good.

Sorry Guinea, but you seem to fail the grasp of an auction. What you are explaining is you want to be greedy and win the best deal and then have the right to reject the others.

An auction is a binding contract that you sign when you bid. It's that simple. If you think a bike is worth £500, place that in the max bid. If you win, great; if you lose also great as you haven't paid over the odds.

If there's 3 bikes for sale all ending at the same time, well, you just gotta choose which you really want.

Having sold a car on ebay and ending up with a non-payer who probably done the same as you want, I can tell you I was in a murderous rage for days because I knew that were bidding on another car hoping to get that cheaper. The emails they sent requesting I hold out for 5 days were unbelievable, despite the fact I required a deposit within 24 hours. I complained to ebay and their account was suspended and then deleted.

guinea

No. Ebay is not like an auction at all.

Ebay is 10000000 psuedo auctions all at once.

Real auctions end when the bidding has stopped, they do not end because the auctioneer has decided it has had enough time.

My point was exectly the one you raised. You simply can't put £500 on three bikes as you might win all three. But then you run the risk of getting sniped. My solution is to stop the sniping by extending the bidding process after every successful bid so that the outbid party has a chance to bid higher. Just like in real life.

An auction is there to generate a sale from a seller to the highest bidder. eBay's system stops that from happening effectively.

TMR

Having tried to sell my Supersix on eBay and failed, I don't understand why I'd get 30 people watching and not one bid. WTF is the point of watching?!

fleshtuxedo

The Mad Rapper wrote:

Having tried to sell my Supersix on eBay and failed, I don't understand why I'd get 30 people watching and not one bid. WTF is the point of watching?!

To see what the item makes so they know what to bid on another one. They might need another size or want a different colour etc, but they'll learn from what yours makes (or doesn't). They also might be busy when the auction happens but not know it when they add it to the watch list.

Evil Laugh

Im a last 10 seconds guy myself. Don't see the point of going in early, let's other people nudge up their bid until they are winning, strange how many people get dragged into all the battles. Also you run the risk of getting outbid having already bid your max and then saying sod it and overpaying because you've developed an attachment to this item you've been winning bidder on for a week.

I decide what I want to pay and press bid right at the death if anything so I don't have the chance to up my own bid in the last minute madness.

morstar

Evil Laugh wrote:

Im a last 10 seconds guy myself. Don't see the point of going in early, let's other people nudge up their bid until they are winning, strange how many people get dragged into all the battles. Also you run the risk of getting outbid having already bid your max and then saying sod it and overpaying because you've developed an attachment to this item you've been winning bidder on for a week.

I decide what I want to pay and press bid right at the death if anything so I don't have the chance to up my own bid in the last minute madness.

Pretty much this. The key point as you and others have said is that when you do bid, bid what you are prepared to pay. If you win, you didn't overspend in a moment of madness and if you don't somebody was prepared to pay more.
There are advantages to bidding late. With a few minutes to go the price is £60. Suppose you have £100 as the max you are prepared to pay, another buyer has a max bid of £80 on ebay but they are actually prepared to go to £110. They may not actually know this yet but will do in afew minutes.
With 10 seconds to go, their £80 bid is the winning bid and they are biting their nails. You dump in your £100 bid and win at £90 while they are frantically hammering the keyboard a few seconds too late. You have won at less than your full exposure despite the fact that another bidder was prepared to pay more than you.
Bidding late, but at your max level gives you a better opportunity to save a few quid if you are ambivalent about the item but, it's horses for courses. If you value the purchase highly, bid early.

rolf_f

morstar wrote:

If you value the purchase highly, bid early.

Nope - always bid late. Just make sure you bid the maximum you are prepared to pay. Aside from the point about making a statement of interest with a low early bid, there is no reason to bid at any point before the last few seconds. Anything else is like showing other players your cards!

izza

Rolf F wrote:

morstar wrote:

If you value the purchase highly, bid early.

Nope - always bid late. Just make sure you bid the maximum you are prepared to pay. Aside from the point about making a statement of interest with a low early bid, there is no reason to bid at any point before the last few seconds. Anything else is like showing other players your cards!

Depends if you are watching an auction on PC or App.

A low bid on the iphone ebay app allows you to get notified when bidding hots up and doesn't reveal your position. That way you are can relax rather than revisiting.

morstar

I would bid earlier if it was an item I really wanted that was hard to get hold of, so that I was confident my bid was in and registered.

If I am prepared to play the game and can face losing, I bid late. If I really want an item my locus of causality has changed and I bid earlier.

I tracked down an old Uniglide freehub body on ebay last year when doing up my steel road bike. Not many of them about and I really wanted to win it. I Bid early and got it at far less than my max.
In cold hard terms, I had overvalued the item and was glad I paid a realistic price in the end but my motivation was to win the auction (within reason) and not necessarily to get a good price.
How do you define the worth of an item when it is hard to get hold of?

unixnerd

My solution is to stop the sniping by extending the bidding process after every successful bid so that the outbid party has a chance to bid higher.

Yahoo auctions used to work that way before they closed it down. I was bidding on a car for a mate and twice after the official end time the bid went up and it was extended five minutes each time.

I'm more of a buy-it-now guy, if I'm buying it tends to be because I need something by a certain time (birthday, replace a broken part, etc) and don't have time on my side. At the moment I'm watching a bike part that ends in 3 days, if it had a decent buy it now price I'd have bought it days ago. The "make offer" addition to buy-it-now is very handy too.

I sell a lot on ebay (been there about 12 years) and it's almost all buy-it-now. Folk tend to want things quickly.

beverick

Benjamin Hall wrote:

.........Do they do it just to push prices up. Idiots!

Isn't that the idea of an auction?

Bob

rolf_f

izza wrote:

A low bid on the iphone ebay app allows you to get notified when bidding hots up and doesn't reveal your position. That way you are can relax rather than revisiting.

I just use a snipe programme. If an item really matters, I'll back up with a manual bid right at the end but I've only had one screw up from a snipe programme so far.

mcj78

I usually wait 'till the last 10 minutes or so to get an idea of how much the item's going to go for - i'll generally wait until the last minute then throw a bid in to prevent some bugger incrementally upping their bid by £1 or whatever until they pip you, of course if someone's put in a much higher max bid there's nowt you can do & fair play to them!

I recently spotted a pair of Ksyrium Equipes in great nick for £70 bin, however when I hit the button, some buffoon had stuck a 99p starting bid on them... watched out of morbid curiosity & they ended up going for about £150 :x

APIII

I was always a last minute bidder, but I spent a few frustrating weeks trying to secure a Zeiss camera lens a while back. Whenever they came up, the winning bid would always ratchet up in the last few seconds to around £600. The last time, I just put in my max of £580 at the start and watch it get nudged up as the week went on. There were a few last second bids, but I ended up getting it for £540, a relative bargain I reckon. Worked for me anyway!

MattC59

Well, I like to bid late.

I've just (about an hour ago) won two bids. One for some Rover V8 heads, complete with chromed P6 rocker covers, which I won for £34.55, and one for a pair of Rover V8 heads for 99p.

Pretty good going !!

Aggieboy

MattC59 wrote:

Well, I like to bid late.

I've just (about an hour ago) won two bids. One for some Rover V8 heads, complete with chromed P6 rocker covers, which I won for £34.55, and one for a pair of Rover V8 heads for 99p.

Pretty good going !!

Shame you've got a Skoda!

Buckled_Rims

Aggieboy wrote:

MattC59 wrote:

Well, I like to bid late.

I've just (about an hour ago) won two bids. One for some Rover V8 heads, complete with chromed P6 rocker covers, which I won for £34.55, and one for a pair of Rover V8 heads for 99p.

Pretty good going !!

Shame you've got a Skoda!

Yeah, but if it was made in Longbridge, it'll rattle-fit onto any head