Bloody Annoying

How important was the SHITTY PHONE CALL????

 

I'm not quite sure I can see how this was Ebay's fault ?

 

Done that many times and just because there were no more bids the winner may have already bid more than you were possibly willing to pay, that's what I tell myself(may make you feel better)

 

Got to tell yourself that it wasn't meant to be Tez.
For future reference make sure all means of distraction are removed when approaching the end of the auction.
Phone turned off, wife locked down cellar etc.

 

I never get stressed about fleabay.

I find an item then decide how much I'm prepared to pay and put that in as my Max bid and walk away. Fleabay then takes care of the bidding. If someone is prepared to pay more then fair fair enough, another similar item will be along soon enough.

A couple of days ago I was bidding on a 2012 Tiger 800 with 3600 miles on it.

As a bike I'd never seen, other than a couple of photos, I decided that £3650 was my limit. That would allow me to fix any imperfections and not have paid over the odds for it. It went for £3900 so someone got a bargain providing the bike is as described but getting carried away and getting into a bidding war is a mugs game.

I've got a mate who just can't get his head round the Max bid thing. He knows how much he's prepared to spend but sits there watching and manually entering his bids.

I've lost count of the times he's lost an item that sold for less than he was prepared to pay because he either left his final bid a fraction too late or there was a network glitch because the teenager next door was downloading porn!

 

Hi Mr Toad, your comments were absolutely on the money - decide how much you are prepared to pay, bid, then leave it alone.

Yes I have lost things because someone else bid a bit more, but there's always another bike/car/phone that'll come along soon enough.

 

Nope, sit till 9 seconds to go and bang in your final bid !!! If you put your top bid in, give the competition time to think about it and way the risks up and possibly just put a bit more in till their winning.

Last minute sniping, wins everytime. Make the opposition complacent, think no one else is interested and they think they'll win a bargain. Brutal when you lose, but that's an auction.

 

Doesn't work like that.

This is exactly the conversation I have with my mate.

You have no idea what my top bid is until after you have bid more.

Item sitting at £12.

I bid a Max of £25.

Item goes to £13 - with me, biding is usually in £1 increments on small items.

You bid of £15

Item goes to £16 - with me and you still have no idea how high my max is.

You wait until the last second and bid £24.99

I win the item at £25 as fleabay outsnipes you. If you were actually prepared to go to £26 then you've blown it as you're out of time.

OR you wait until the last minute and bid £26 and you win the item. Absolutely nothing to do with sniping and everything to do with your max bid being higher than mine.

Of course if your first bid is £26 then fleabay will autobid in whatever tho lowest increments is for both of us until I hit £25 and you hit £26. This is the only way to find my max bid and as it is my max bid I wouldn't enter any more even if I had the time.

 

So I bang a bid in of £26, you go research and realise that actually would be worth £27 to you because you can't find it anywhere else for less than £30. I lose.

That's why it is good to snipe. Why not? If I am willing to put in the effort. I decide on my top price, if it doesn't reach that by 9 seconds, I chuck my bid in. If it's gone over, I walk away.

 

i bought a jacket off ebay once, it was sitting at £30.00 however i was prepared to pay up to £100 for it,but no way was i putting my bid in until the last minute otherwise other bidders could have just kept upping the bid..so i do what Ron does and stuck my bid of £100 in with 10 seconds to go and got it for £55.00

 

I would have gone £102.17p in case like that to beat the 'rounder upper's' it often works for me.

 

Used to use Goofbay (Goofbid) puts in your bid to a preset max 2 seconds before the end it was a free tool but you have to pay now

 

Oh, it was you was it!!
The times I've put in bids in the last 10 seconds thinking 'that cant be beat' only for it to disappear with-in the few last seconds!
In all honesty I hardly use Fleebay these days, got sick of getting ripped off with rubbish and Fleebay doing nothing but back the commercial sellers!
Very rarely risk more than a fiver now.
And under ABSOLUTELY sell nothing on it!

 

There's nothing wrong with any strategy that people choose but it pays to understand how the system works and fleabay doesn't work how a lot of people think it does.

eBay isn't an auction in the true sense of the word. They run until there are no more bids.

eBay is a sealed bid system and you have until the 'auction' end time to place your bid. It's a misconception that the very last bid wins simply because an auto bid takes no time at all.

It's perhaps explained in this extract from here.

https://www.thebalance.com/sniping-on-ebay-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-1139904


eBay’s built-in proxy bidding system wins against snipe bids. Thanks’ to eBay’s built-in proxy bidding system, would-be “snipers” are often foiled in their attempts to save a buck and end up losing items they’d have won if they’d bid on eBay (rather than using a sniping service) in the first place. The reason for this is simple: veteran eBay shoppers simply tell eBay (using the proxy bidding system) that they want to outbid potential snipers. When snipers bid at the last moment, therefore, eBay immediately responds (it takes literally zero seconds) with veteran shoppers’ pre-arranged counter-bids, ironically leaving the sniper from the sniping service as the one with no time to respond. New snipers are often frustrated by this “cheating,” but anyone is free to use eBay’s built-in proxy bidding service, just as anyone is free to snipe.

 

That sounds good for Ebay, not the buyer. It is more likely to go for a higher price if you set a high initial bid, then anybody else just creeps up to that bid and try to beat you. This is not the way to get a bargain tho'.

Dozers Dad is also right in saying you don't get caught in that bidding war, if you don't win, you don't win, no chance of talking yourself in to a higher bid, it's all over.

Each unto their own Mr Toad, but I will continue to bid this way.

Plus I do like the buzz sitting there waiting to pinch it for a bargain price !!!!

 

Get hold of an auction sniper. Decide your max bid. Tell Sniper and it waits till last few seconds (e.g. 10 secs on the free one three secs on the paid for one), and enters just enough to win if still below your max.

If you put your own max in to Ebay and leave it then you might get in to an automatic bidding war in your absence and end up paying more than necessary, or see your max exceeded unnecessarily.