Fed up with last second bids

[dercoggins]

I getting outbid 4 seconds before the end of an auction, when there has been no other prior bids. These bids are made by anonymous bidders, obviously professionals as they have 30 or so going at the same time. It's no fun any more - eBay must be losing buyers in droves - it's just becoming a commercial marketplace. There needs to be some changes made somehow - of course you can't contact anyone in eBay to complain directly. David

[chameleon54]

I only sell with buy it nows on my stores, but still use a lot of auctions on the private account. I sell some unusual and rare items on this account and using auctions means I often get some very nice suprises price wise. I start my auctions at a reasonable price, with any extra bids being a bonus.

Auctions also attract a large group of buyers who dont ever look at BINS. ( yes there is still a lot of buyers who only search for auctions. ) Auctions also have a clearly defined end time, adding some urgency to the purchase. Will I get outbid and miss out ? Will the seller relist If I dont buy it at aucion ?  Potential buyers at auction dont just watch items. THEY ACTUALLY BUY STUFF.

I had around 50 auctions finish today from the most recent freebies and achieved very good sales numbers with many items reaching higher prices than I would have listed them for as BINS.

[springyzone]

I don't doubt it, I find a lot of what I would call private sales are still auction format, & it makes sense that if you have an unusual or rare item that you put it to auction to see what the market is like.

But what I have found is over the last few years, 'professional' sellers seem to have taken over a lot. I had a look through my own watched list just before, and every single item was a 'buy it now' format.

It's not that I go out of my way to look at the profesionals as against the home sellers & I am perfectly happy to buy good second hand items, there just seem to be a lot fewer of them available than a decade ago.

[*tippy*toes*]

My listings do better at auction than BIN's. Most of my competition are BIN's. Sometimes my start bid will be higher than their BIN, but some people still prefer the thrill of an auction and will pay far more than what they would buying it outright. Newbie buyers seem to push the auctions higher, which is fine by me!

Most of my purchases are auction. Mr Tippy mostly uses BIN. Occasionally he'll find a really hard to get item that is up for auction and he gets me to bid because he knows I'm a good sniper. I am good at hitting the button so the bid registers with 1 second to go. Sometimes I still get outbid by someone else's high bid, sometimes I don't. That's the risk you take being a sniper. If I get outbid, it means that someone else was willing to pay more than I was.

[banj-9559]

I'm with you or else you get upset often.

[davewil1964]

dercoggins hasn't visited the boards for over SEVEN years, so I doubt they will even know you replied to them.

[4channel]

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@clayloudermilk wrote:

nonsense!
if people sniping didn't reduce the price for BUYERS they would not be doing it.
people do it because they pay less for items, not more. it's bad news for sellers. even worse news for eBay. they must be losing millions as a result.

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Good point by the above but .....

While it can mean less money for sellers there are times where it can be a bonus. I have seen at least ten people bidding on an item in the last couple of minutes and then a last few secs a bigger bidder will come in and hit it.  Some people get off on the whole vibe of it and for some rare items seller does well.

[davewil1964]

You are well and truly late to the party. This thread was started MANY years ago, and done and dusted nearly FIVE years ago.

Only mugs, these days, use auctions. And I doubt many end their listings before end time out of pique. Which was the subject of the thread.

Just keeping it in context and on-topic.

[springyzone]

It's true, this is a mega old thread, but like quite a few of them, it seems to be having a little flutter again.

I was just reading (or maybe re reading, can't rememeber) one of claymilk's posts about sniping bids.

I've done sniping myself but I have to admit he had a point.

Without sniping, everyone would be sort of forced to put in a bid earlier in the piece, with their max amount or else sit at a computer till the actual end of an auction and take their chances. I think you'd still see the last minute scramble in some cases, but there would be more chance of bids being more spread out.

I do think some sellers-probably more so new sellers- may be inclined to finish an auction early out of consternation if they are worried that an auction isn't going to reach the sort of price they hoped. They may feel their auction isn't getting much interest and they would be better to try elsewhere. It probably isn't a massive problem these days as auctions are a lot rarer than they used to be.

I am actually watching one seller who has had a long list of pick up items on auction over the last few weeks with excellent results on the whole. One big sideboard/buffet though recently started at auction at $1 and I thought-no, don't do that. Sure enough, it only got one bid. I am waiting to see the outcome in feedback as I don't think it will end well.

I think there is still a place for auctions, but it would depend a lot on what you were selling. Ebay has changed a lot and most of the things I buy now have a set price but for rare or unusual items, I can see auctions being a good way to go.

[eburtonlab]

Without sniping, everyone would be sort of forced to put in a bid earlier in the piece, with their max amount or else sit at a computer till the actual end of an auction and take their chances.

Without sniping? Or without sniping services?

Many users manually bid in the last few seconds without resorting to using sniping services. Even if eBay banned third-party sniping services entirely, I doubt that would much affect the distribution of bids throughout an auction. Most bids would tend to happen at the end of the auction regardless, unless eBay prevented late bidding without an earlier prior bid. That would mean that unless you found an auction early enough and bid on it, you could not bid on it at all, which sounds like a solution in search of a problem.

Many bidders that have been outbid at the last second have toyed with the idea of eBay preventing those sorts of bids, or with the idea of extending auctions if there are bids in the last minute or so.

There have been other auction sites that extended auctions until there was a period where no new bids were received for a certain amount of time. I notice many of those auction sites are no longer in business. For the most part, buyers and sellers hated online auctions with no fixed end time, which required bidding again and again every five minutes because someone else outbid you by a few pennies to extend the auction another five minutes. It turns out that few users were willing to babysit an auction that dragged on and on.

It is always easy to say "If I had only bid a bit more, I would have won" -- easy, and often wrong, since the winner's maximum is not revealed in most cases. "I would have bid more" is the rallying cry of those who have not learned to bid their maximum amount in the time provided.

Once you have bid your true maximum amount, any bidding extensions do not help you.

Extensions can actually hurt you if you are up against a nibbling newbie bidder, sport bidding retractor, or shilling seller.

How does the saying go? "Newbies bid at a bargain price, hoping to win; snipers bid to win, hoping for a bargain."

[springyzone]

Well, technically without sniping services, I suppose, as if they weren't available no one could use them.

Yes, i know many bidders bid in the last few seconds without using a sniping service. I've done that myself many times. The reason was these days, I don't like to reveal my bid earlier on as I had trouble with what i believe 100% was a shilling bidder once before.

I also don't like the auction sites without a set finishing time, where the auction goes on and on if anyone bids a few cents more. I am much more comfortable with a set finishing time for an auction.

In a perfect world, people would always bid their max and walk away, confident in the knowledge they would either win or lose and it didn't matter as if they lost, it was because the bidding went higher than they wanted to go anyway. But I think some people do that but decide at the last minute that yes, they are willing, after all, to go a bit higher. Had that happen once in real life too where a bidder on a property told us afterwards she went $30k above what she had been going to bid. She didn't win, but all the same she had revised her ideas.

And yes, even if you lose an auction on ebay (or elsewhere) you can't necessarily be sure that a small extra bid would have secured it for you as you have no idea what the other people were going to bid up to.

I don't know that without sniping services, the distribution of bids would be vastly different but it may be slightly different. In any case, these days a lot of auctions only get one bid so it isn't much of an issue there. But without sniping bids, I think a lot of buyers would put their bid in in the last few minutes but not necessarily in the last 4 or 5 seconds. I don't suppose we'll ever know though, for sure.