eBay Trading Company

[j4]

Please bear in mind before reading this that there are no stupid questions, only STUPID PEOPLE. So, sorry in advance for being dense.

Can anybody provide me with a very quick beginner's guide to eBay bidding tactics? I simply have no idea how the bidding tends to work -- whether lots of bids tend to happen at the last minute, whether it's better to bid on the cheaper thing with more time to run or the thing that's already at a higher price but has less time to go, or ... or what. Or whether the bidding patterns vary enormously depending on the thing for sale, or stuff like that.

Er, basically, in summary, "hello, am clueless, but want to buy thing off eBay without spending masses more money than I need to". :-)

Comments

[crazyscot.livejournal.com]

Make good use of eBay's proxy bidding, but be aware that it's possible to find out somebody's bid limit (manually - by rebidding an increment at a time) and bid just above that.

Lots of people snipe, particularly if the item is in high demand.
(Sniping = last minute bidding. Doing so minimises the time in which you can be outbid or have your price pushed up. There are services out there which will attempt to snipe automatically on your behalf, but I don't trust them, and I don't think autosniping is particularly ethical, even if lots of people do it. Autosniping can go spectacularly wrong, too; one item I was recently interested in went from £12 to £25 in the last four minutes; looked like three sniper bots had a good old fight...)

I often put in a minimal bid (i.e. current + minimum increment) early on in a auction if I particularly want something, so it appears at the top of "My eBay", and go back to manually snipe (or get cold feet) later assuming the auction end time coincides with my being at a terminal.

[imc.livejournal.com]

Ditto. (Placing an early bid also defends against accusations of unfair sniping - not that I'm obliged to consider sniping as unfair or to defend my bidding tactics.)

If I'd willingly pay £30 for an item then I might put, say £12.34 on it immediately [see under "don't bid round figures"] and then raise it to the full £30 as close to the end of the auction as I dare (maybe via £21.43 about 10 minutes before the end just in case of last-minute technical hitches).

The first bid might win after all, which is good if I forget to come back at the end of the auction (I've lost at least one item that I really wanted by forgetting like that). In any case, the bid keeps the item on my "my eBay" page and will cause me to be notified if someone outbids it. It can then sometimes be satisfying to see the other bids and think "Hah, you think you are going to win this with your puny £13" and then post your real bid to claim the item.

Bidding in small increments is fairly pointless as it's pretty easy for someone else to outbid you.
<boring_anecdote>The most recent item I bought on eBay I won with tactics of the above form against another bidder who was bidding in small increments. When, a day or two before the end of the auction, my £12.34 [not the actual amount] was outbid, it was a fair guess from the fact that the other person had placed two bids that they had gone something like "£10... no good... try £15 then" so my £30 would easily be enough to win the item. As it was, about 15 minutes before the end I got nervous and posted my intermediate bid - and you could see the price of the item gradually rising in increments of £1 or so, until I had been outbid. So when I posted my final bid about 2 minutes before the end it was pretty much a foregone conclusion. The other person got two or three more bids in before the end, but I still won it at a pretty fair price. Of course, if I'd left my bid until later it would probably have cost me less, although I'd have been more worried about missing it because of bad timing.</boring_anecdote>

Anyway. Although there's the odd item that no one but you seems to be interested in, you should expect the price to rise quite rapidly during the last several minutes of the auction. There's no infallible method of winning, of course.

[sesquipedality.livejournal.com]

People's objection to sniping seems to basically boil down to "people are bidding tactically, and because I am unprepared to do so, I am losing auctions to them". I'm less convinced about having a program do it for you, although I'm not sure I regard that as actually *unethical* per se. Just perhaps a little impolite.