Jorpho wrote:

Does no one else here routinely bid on items that no one else seems to be interested in?

No one bids on my auctions at all. 🙁

That is the Mecca of eBay...

Jorpho wrote:

Does no one else here routinely bid on items that no one else seems to be interested in?

No one bids on my auctions at all. 🙁

I occasionally check random auctions if i'm awake in the early hours of the morning (2am for example)... Some people really do have their auctions ending at silly times, and it's the best way to get a bargain as most other (normal) people are asleep 🤣.

I do remember winning an auction for a nicely boxed Sega Mega Drive (Genesis) for just 99p + p&p, but the seller told me in the morning that the console had broke and they weren't going to sell it to me in that condition.... A couple of weeks later and it was relisted as working 😠.

@dirkmirk
Whoa! Do I see there an Ensoniq VIVO90 soundcard?

fillosaurus wrote:

@dirkmirk
Whoa! Do I see there an Ensoniq VIVO90 soundcard?

It certainly looks like one to me... Were they any good?

Anyone want to snipe this auction for a new Radeon 9500 Pro? I got outbid and won't bid again as i no longer need or want it, but someone here might be interested?

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/121073713001?ssPage … 984.m1426.l2649

Please feel free to outbid me on these Voodoo2 cards too as i don't really need them (but obviously i will pay for them if i win the auction).... Damn this impulse bidding 🤣.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/261179430857?ssPage … 984.m1423.l2649

fillosaurus wrote:

@dirkmirk
Whoa! Do I see there an Ensoniq VIVO90 soundcard?

Not sure I was actually after the S3 805 VLB videocard, the other unusual sound cards is just a bonus, the seller contacted me If I wanted a whole bunch of other old video cards so I asked what they were he was only going to charge me $10 for the lot including the stuff I already won, he got back me just the usual pci S3 Trio/V/64+/DX cards, plus A pci ET6000, I was like "Hell Yeah!", not that its very collectable but a good card none the less , I did'nt want the S3 cards or the Trident 9440.

He did'nt make any money out of the sale but he said he was glad someone was going to make use of the cards, I thought that was a nice gesture.

Initially I too felt immensely irritated by the so called snipers. Yes, they DO play dirty. It's not a fair game to see if either party wants to see who would like to pay more to get an item, but turned that the sniper just wants to grab the item without letting know the intention to the other party.

Then I learnt to accept my limitations and decided to cap my spending limit, and would only bid upto the max amount I'm willing to pay, no matter how bad I wanted it. Going any further, is upto the sniper's moves, and I'm not bothered if it crosses my budget. Even if I lost the bid, I'm still happy since the price is not what I'm willing to pay, and able to save that much of money anyway.

Of course, if one does not mind parting with the money, one can place a 10-fold increase in the bid amount in the last 15 or 30 minutes. If the sniper still wins, he REALLY wanted it bad and he pays more than the value. If the sniper lost, the the one who placed the bid might be the winner or loser, depending which way you're looking at it.

Snipers are sniping each other for the most part and it's pretty comical to check the bid history after an item is off the blocks - huge rush of feverish program bidding in the closing seconds. It happens enough that I'm not entirely convinced that sniping is all that indispensable, at least in terms of getting the lowest price. The trick is to to find items that are likely to attract little attention, and a *whole* lot of patience/self control.

I have only ever once lost at a sniping match. Someone listed a Tyan VL/EISA board. I had been waiting for one of those for years. I had never seen one before, or ever since. I put in a bid of $130USD at the last second. I honestly didn't expect the bidding to go above $35, but some son of a bitch outbid me. Looking back I'm somewhat glad I lost, since I got basically the same thing for $35 a week later.

http://www.uncreativelabs.de/th99/m/S-T/31674.htm

I generally loose to snipers when I'm sitting on the high bid at or close to my limit on an item that has not drawn much attention. Then in the closing moments one or more snipers jump in and run it up well beyond my limit.

I'm sort of a 'bottom feeder' so sniping probably wouldn't help me as much as those who more consistently bid close to or over the typical going price - that's where the competition is most fierce. But judging very unique or unusual items can be tricky unless you know exactly what you're willing to pay. That's the area I experience the greatest letdowns - finding out the hard way I would have gladly paid more fore something...

I don't trust any auction that completely hides the bidders identity... You never know if shill bidding is involved when they do that!

I've never used auto bidding tools, but I kind of wish I had when I was shopping for an MT-32. I lost an auction on one in great condition with manual (and maybe box?) and had to settle for a rather worn-looking one with no manual (fortunately Roland still has free digital versions of their manuals).

I'd love to get a CM-64, but they seem to be extremely rare. I'll probably just stick to Munt for things that are better on CM-32/64 than on MT-32.

sheath wrote:

I am an ebay sniper The way ebay has been since the beginning is bidding early only drives the price up. Anybody who bids early only drives up the final price, that is all that happens. If all of us dropped our bids in the last ten seconds the outcome would be exactly what each of us imagined at that time. Bidding earlier only gets people thinking they might want to pay more for something than they originally thought.

Basically, if I just want to buy something I compare the price on Amazon or Ebay and check completed listings for comparison. If I am unwilling to pay those prices I save a search and occasionally save auction listings and keep an eye on them If I have the time and the money and the auction is closing at a reasonable price and at a reasonable time I might sit and watch it down to the last ten seconds and place my maximum bid.

I don't figure this is snagging anything out from anybody because more often than not the other bidders put a higher maximum bid anyway. It just keeps me from adding five or ten bucks to the pot because I've become too infatuated with that particular item.

This is exactly why I snipe too.

PowerPie5000 wrote:

I don't trust any auction that completely hides the bidders identity... You never know if shill bidding is involved when they do that!

EVERY ebay auction hides the bidder's identity now. It stops harassment from taking place. I used to get floods of angry messages from the people I sniped all the time. It was really annoying. 😉

FeedingDragon wrote:

I don't consider myself a sniper. If I'm bidding on an item with a reputable seller (read the feedback, all of them,) I'll pla […]
Show full quote

I don't consider myself a sniper. If I'm bidding on an item with a reputable seller (read the feedback, all of them,) I'll place my maximum bid on an item and then just let it go. Win or lose. If I'm not completely comfortable with the seller, I will tend to snipe a bit. Again, I'm just bidding my max bid. If the price has already gone over that amount, then it's no longer in my watch list anyways. I don't do this to upset anyone, or to try and "sneak" in an easy win of some sort. I've learned to do this because of what several sellers have done to me (or at least, I strongly suspect they did to me.) I now have 5 sellers on my ignore list (I will never buy from them no matter what.) Here is the sequence of events in all 5 cases (complaints filed with eBay with no actions taken.)

Item goes up for bid ($0.99)
I place my max bid - say $50 ($0.99)
7ish days pass with no activity
10 minutes (or so) before end of auction, 51 bids all come in within a few moments of each other each $1 more than the previous ($51 I'm no longer winning.)
The final "bid" is withdrawn with the seller's consent.
I now win the item at $50
All 51 bids were from a single user, with little or no feedback.
All 51 bids (and the withdrawal) take place in an extremely short period of time.
Conclusion: The seller used a shill account to raise the bid to my max then one step beyond, so that I would be forced to pay my max amount even though nobody else was interested in the item. eBay claims that this is not allowed, but I've never seen them do anything about it. So, I gave up. Now, I research a seller, and when in doubt, don't give them the time to pull that on me again.

FYI - You used to be able to pull up a detailed bidding history that actually listed the bidder's handle and the amount of each bid (you cannot do that any more.) When I'm at $0.99 at 10 minutes to go, then at end time I'm at my exact max bid, I got a little suspicious and looked into it. AFAIK, the sellers are still up and selling and my negative feedback have all faded from visibility.

Your example is impossible. If your maximum bid is retracted, then ALL your bids are retracted. The high bid then falls back to where it was before the first bid made by the high bidder was made, so if the auction was started a 99 cents, gets bid up by one person to over your max bid amount then is retracted the high bid falls back to 99 cents. It's been like that ever since I started on ebay in 1999.

I think he's talking about somebody else's bid being retracted, not his own. If the other person is constantly raising the price until he is the highest bidder ($51) and then retract it, the closing price will be the highest bid of the first bidder. I've seen it be done by a friend of mine just to check how much somebody else would have bid on an item that he wanted. But it's not fair if you asked me...

Markk wrote:

I think he's talking about somebody else's bid being retracted, not his own. If the other person is constantly raising the price until he is the highest bidder ($51) and then retract it, the closing price will be the highest bid of the first bidder. I've seen it be done by a friend of mine just to check how much somebody else would have bid on an item that he wanted. But it's not fair if you asked me...

What he was saying that someone entered multiple bids to push it up to his max and then retracted leaving him stuck paying his max bid but that can't happen because when the person making the bids to find his max retracts, then all the bids he made that pushed it up are retracted, too, so whatever the max bid was before the shiller got involved is what the max bid will be when the auction ends, it won't be his max bid.

Example: listing starts at .99. I bid $50. Shill bidder comes along and bids, $1, $2, $3, $4, etc until my max is found than bids another dollar over that. Shill bidder then retracts. The max bid is not now $50, it is now .99 like it was before he started bidding because ALL of the shill bids are retracted, not just the highest one. The OP stated that he got stuck paying his max bid after the shill bidder retracted and that would be impossible under ebay's retraction system.

It's been over a year since I saw that happening live, but I think that it wasn't like that. Perhaps there's a difference if the other bidder bids $51 in the beggining, or keeps raising by $1 or any other small amount each time. After all it makes sense not to go back to 0.99. Your maximum bid was set to $50. That means you're willing to pay that much. If someone bids $49 you're going be the highest bidder with $50. Then if he bids $51 and then retract it, isn't it going to be $50 again?

Markk wrote:

It's been over a year since I saw that happening live, but I think that it wasn't like that. Perhaps there's a difference if the other bidder bids $51 in the beggining, or keeps raising by $1 or any other small amount each time. After all it makes sense not to go back to 0.99. Your maximum bid was set to $50. That means you're willing to pay that much. If someone bids $49 you're going be the highest bidder with $50. Then if he bids $51 and then retract it, isn't it going to be $50 again?

He would have to retract all his previous bids and then bid just under your max in order to keep your max bid the highest but then you can report the listing to ebay and they will see that you were clearly shilled and cancel the transaction or if you notice the shilling happening before the auction ends then you just retract your own bid so you don't get screwed over.

The thing I hate is when a seller ends a listing early because he isn't getting what he wanted to sell the item for then claims that the item is no longer available and 2 weeks later you see him trying to sell the same item again and ebay does nothing about it.

First off, you cannot just "retract" your bid. You can only retract a bid with the agreement of the seller. Which is one reason I was suspicious, the blinding speed at which the "shill" account retracted a bid and the seller agreed to it. Second, if you retract a bid, it does NOT retract all your previous bids, it only retracts the last one made. I know this because this is what happened to me... I saw it plain as day in the bid history. User Shilly bids $10, You automatically raise your bid to $10 (I bid first so I get priority,) followed by 41 more entries. Until the next to last bid is Shilly bids $50 you automatically raise your bid to $50 (same as before.) The last line is Shilly bids $51, you have been out bid Shilly is now winning the item. Then a note next to Shilly's final bid - "withdrawn with seller's permission." NOTE: These are not direct quotes, the text may have varied and the user names were definitely NOT Shilly, it's just an example. In all the times this has happened to me the case was almost identical to what I typed.

This has to do with the way eBay's automated system works. When you put in your max "bid" you are NOT bidding that amount, you are basically telling your proxy (the eBay software,) not to bid more than that. Your proxy looks at the current bid, compares it to your max, then makes a bid just higher than the current (in theory.) In actuality, it cheats a little. It takes a look at the current bidder's "maximum" bid, and bids just above that if yours is higher. If yours is NOT higher, then it just bids your max. That is if you are joining a bid. If you are already holding the bid it works a little different, the other proxy places a bid (their max bid, since your max is higher than theirs,) so your proxy immediately places a bid of the same amount (remember first bidder gets priority.) This continues until a proxy joins in with a max higher than yours. But each an every time someone enters an amount less than your max, and you raise to meet it, is considered a separate and distinct bid. So, I set my max to $50, but I only bid $0.99. If you then set your max at $75, the software would compare and you would bid $51 (cutting me out.) If you then withdrew your bid, I would drop back down to my last bid of $0.99. However, if you had set your max to $50, you would have bid $50 (since it is equal to or less than mine,) and I would have immediately placed a $50 bid to match it. If you then decided you wanted to pay $75 and set that as your max, the system would have then set your bid at $51. Even if you later withdrew that $51 bid, my $50 bid would still be in play.