Nibble bidding

[bombbloke]

A silly little question which has been asked before - I might've even known the answer once, but I don't now and can't find a thread with the answer - and it's going to be stuck in my head until I can get some sort of plausible explanation for it.

Usually I seagull auctions (or snipe them, choose your term). Yesterday, feeling lazy from too many BINs recently, I decided to place a bid on an item about 24 hours before it ended.

Anyway, the auction finishes up and I lose. No big deal. But the bidding history confuses me; there were only two other bidders, and they were both nibblers, submitting nearly thirty bids between them. Over twenty of these came from one of the pair over the course of about an hour and a half - he never passed my maximum, the other nibbler achieved that.

Now, I don't for a moment suspect shilling, as the seller's account isn't suspicious in any way. Normally I'd assume that the bidders don't understand autobidding, but... the guy who put in the bulk of the bids had a feedback score of 888 (more than double my own).

So on to my question - is there any possible benefit from bidding a buck at a time, as opposed to just dropping in the max figure you're willing to pay? Even if it's just to mess with people's heads?!

[wilk1149]

Yeah, almost everything. Mobile devices are becoming more versatile all the time so it won't be long before they will surpass desk tops. I'm cheeky too. I'm still on Telstra call credits, so I get five cents for every minute someone calls me. I get a friend that can call after six for free to call me for a couple of nights in a row. Collect fifty dollars a month. Buy three gig of internet access and I'm set for a month and it costs absolutely nothing.

[bakeandfry]

Hahaha, that is cheeky. Gulp! Three gigs for a month, holy hell, i usualy get around 1.5 to last a month, i was using more on my old phone but since upgraded...

[digital*ghost]

There is an old saying (no idea who to credit for it):

Nibblers bid for a bargain and hope to win, snipers bid to win and hope for a bargain.

I know that when I was a newbie, I thought the idea of bidding on eBay was to try and keep the price low (got that right), and that the way to do that was - when you want an item - only bid just enough to be the current winner and hope it stays that way until auction end (obviously got that wrong). I quickly realised that each time I reassessed my bid, and bid higher etc, I was just pushing the price up and giving other people the chance to push it even higher, so I soon changed my ways and became a sniper. 

[modestbods]

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@wilk1149 wrote:
Yeah, almost everything. Mobile devices are becoming more versatile all the time so it won't be long before they will surpass desk tops. I'm cheeky too. I'm still on Telstra call credits, so I get five cents for every minute someone calls me. I get a friend that can call after six for free to call me for a couple of nights in a row. Collect fifty dollars a month. Buy three gig of internet access and I'm set for a month and it costs absolutely nothing.

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lol love it. Nice to see someone scoring one for the good guys, & especially from the Telstra.

[modestbods]

I'm always mystified to see buyers with very high fb that keep bidding & outbidding in the last hour or so. They're there to the death anyway, why on earth wouldn't they just snipe it... crazy.

I usually tend to bid twice on very low start auctions. I'm the optimistic looking fool you see with a single bid as low to the start of 1c, or 99c, as I can get. If the price is still right near the end I then snipe with my second bid in the dying seconds.

[bombbloke]

Phones and tablets won't totally replace for computers any time soon (if at all) - though it's already the case that for the average Joe, they can deal with whatever's needed in day to day life.

Says a lot that I can run BASIC interpreters on my phone these days, and that's one of the *least* complex things it can do. Stream video from my file server? Check, and the 32gb SD in it holds a ridiculous amount on its own. Internet browsing? Check, I can reconfigure my network from my phone. Games? Heh, more than anyone could play. That's an $80 prepaid these days.

But I doubt I'll ever willingly give up on my XP rig!

[zanadoo_56]

I like nibble bidders!

A few months ago I watched the very slow (and very low amounts) progress of an item I was interested in which would normally sell for a high figure.  To my surprise with about 8 hours to go it was still cheap and still attracting only nibble bids.  In the end I set a snipe and and decided to leave it at that.  It's also worth noting that it was a US listing but it finished in what would be the graveyard hours in US.

The next day I logged on and found I had won....at a price considerably less than I expected.  When I looked at the bidding history it appeared that I was the only snipe bidder, the rest were from a pair nibble bidders who I'm guessing must have eventually given up and gone to bed.

That's my most recent success with nibble bid auctions but it's not the only one.

[modestbods]

Btw, there are some auctions when you are better off not to snipe, but rather get your bid in with a minute or so to go. If it's a new item that is popular with resellers & from experience you know there's certain to be one or more try to snipe it, you are often better served to get in before them, that way you don't get **bleep** blocked in the last second traffic jam.

 It sucks to know your bid was the highest & would have been the winner except that someone got their slightly lower bid in a split second before you, and because your bid was now under the next minimum bidding increment your bid was invalid & wouldn't land.

[digital*ghost]

My strategies tended to vary depending on the starting price, seller and auction end-time...plus how much I wanted the item, but most of the time my snipes were manual, especially if I really wanted the item (sometimes I'd set a snipe via a site, then panic at the thought it might not go through and place an even higher manual bid well before the auction was due to end - I did that for an auction ran by the writer / vocalist for one of my favourite bands, anyway, most expensive music item I ever bought, but man was I happy when I got the 'won' notification 😄  - exclusive song no one else would ever be able to get unless I shared it ). 

Manual sniping has its disadvantages though - or more specifically, carpy internet does. I was collecting a set of official bootlegs from one artist, and had 4 / 5, with the fifth finally making an appearance on eBay (in my price range) after over a year. I sat there counting down the minutes, then with 20 mins to go, my net connection went kaput... I got back online about 3 minutes after the auction ended, no snipes or prior bids placed. I shoulda had a nibble because only one other person placed a bid - I wanted to cry, LOL. 

If the start price was 99c I'd always place an early bid, kind of as an 'expression of interest', as I expected I'd be outbid and I'd place my real bid later on, but then for other sellers, I began to figure out they always sent second chance offers no matter what, or if my bid was above a certain amount, so I'd actually bid as soon as they were listed so I could place the lowest bid possible that would result in an SCO. o_o

[modestbods]

When I snipe I only ever manual snipe. Ditto, Ive had thóse disco bidding blues too.

Ahhh I used to love the sellers that send sco's, I did the same as you. I use to have a field day buying novelty lighters from HK & Indonesia to resell via minimum bid sco's... right up until I found out it was illegal to import them via air post (had never got stopped though, but wasn't worth risking a fine). Haven't had a sco in years now though, I don't think many sellers still make the offer, certainly none that I deal with..

I put a minimum bid in simply to get around the 200 item limit in my watch list (which is far too small for my purposes). The Bids/Offers list has no maximum number of items that you can bid on, and whether your bid is winning or not it allows you to track/watch the auction. For instance, at one point in August I had just under 4,000 active auctions I had bid on that I was watching via my Bids/Offers list.

 I buy cheaply through carpet bombing (bidding) the type of items I want from the various suppliers I trust. Invariably I get a percentage of them at the price I want. I have set limits I bid at for certain items and I don't go over it. As a result I don't necessarily win a high % of the auctions (except on certain honey hole days/occassions). It defeats the purpose imo to wait around for just a handful of auctions to maybe win one or two, as what you save in $$s on the item you probably lose many times over in the time it costs you. So instead of a dozen auctions I go after a score of auctions in the same time.

It works out pretty well, I get the goodies cheap, so I pass that on & resell them cheap. Usually it works out that the price I resell them at here in Aussie is around the avg ebay auction price they fetch in the same China sellers auctions that I bid on, and well below their BINs. I still make a healthy 150-200% profit & turn them over fast. I'd rather sell 5 items for a $2 profit each than 1 item for a $5 profit.