Ebay is rigged

snip---

Pretty much what DoN said, but be advised that if there are two bids, only cents apart, the high bid wins. Susan beat out a person by three cents on a piece of Tiffany glass. It's not common, but it happens. High bid wins.

Harold

On Tue, 17 Feb 2009 23:50:36 -0500, the infamous snipped-for-privacy@snyder.on.ca scrawled the following:

True. The key is to snipe (late) so the price isn't incremented up during the whole auction. Incrementing triples or quadruples the price even if there _is_ no high proxy bidder. Sniping removes the one-upmanship game in auctions. Eez gud schtuffs, Maynard.

What sniping software do you guys use? I'm still doing it manually.

-- I'm still waiting for another sublime, transcendent flash of adequacy. --Winnie of RCM

On Wed, 18 Feb 2009 06:58:26 GMT, the infamous "Harold and Susan Vordos" scrawled the following:

Did you two ever receive justice regarding that expensive bogus piece a few years ago? What was it, $1,200 or something? Ouch!

-- I'm still waiting for another sublime, transcendent flash of adequacy. --Winnie of RCM

Harold sez:

"Pretty much what DoN said, but be advised that if there are two bids, only cents apart, the high bid wins. Susan beat out a person by three cents on a piece of Tiffany glass. It's not common, but it happens. High bid wins."

Harold, I hope in some way Susan's successful bid heped make up for the scrape you got into with the Florida crooks some years ago.

Bob Swinney

I beat some bidders by zero cents.

you got into with the

..."Second chance offers" may also mean that the high bidder was the seller's shill, doing just a bit too well at cranking the price up, which is why I suggest declining them. As for multiple items, there's a whole messy category just for handling those, without second chances.

Auctionstealer

That only works when the three cents higher bid (hers, in this case) is earlier than the lower one. Otherwise, it would have had to be over by the minimum bid increment.

For that matter. if the other bidder's maximum is less than the minimum increment above her actual bid, the fact that he bid more than she (later than she) won't do it -- she will still win.

Enjoy, DoN.

Not necessarily: if the current bid is $10 & his max is $15, if I bid $15.03 I win. My $15.03 is more than the minimum over the current $10 & greater than his max of $15.

Bob

Bidding early works for me because I usually get busy and totally forget about the item until its ended. I have other things to do other than watch ebay all day.

Thank You, Randy

Remove 333 from email address to reply.

You should be using a sniping program.

ISP's have hiccups, like anything else. A bid sent in three seconds before the end may not get there in time. Bidding early with your maximum bid is senseless, as it drives up the price. A snipe works best because it DOES go in the last few seconds because of their superior connection, and you'll either get it for what you want to pay or less.

imho, ymmv, and all that

Steve

The 10th data point is in:

j) I bid $10, the winner bid $10.50

What does it all mean about rec.crafts.metalworking? I am not drawing posts from code breakers. If the most likely number of bids is 0, then we should be able to have some bids of 1, given sample of 10.

Personally, I feel that the rate of shill bidding has increased dramatically since eBay hid the identities of bidders. That action rendered the bidder search function unusable and made it impossible for bidders to talk to each other.

My experience with eBay has led me to conclude that they don't really care what sort of shenanigans are going on, if they get their fees.

That depends. If you are running the sniping program on your own system, it is still vulnerable to the hiccups of the connection.

And *I* will not use a sniping site rather than a program on my own computer, because it puts your username and password in the hands of the people running the sniping site. (And vulnerable to any security holes in their site if someone should decide to attack that site to collect a bunch of username/password pairs.)

For that matter -- I suspect that using a sniping site *would* be a violation of the policy agreement you "signed" when you joined eBay, because you promise to keep control of your username/password pair. If you hand it to a sniping site, you have violated that part of the agreement, and eBay can justifiably kick you off.

Using a program on your own computer, however, or sniping manually are totally outside that limitation.

Enjoy, DoN.

The sample is skewed by the fact that these are things which attracted *your* interest enough to bid -- and someone else is likely to have very similar interests. So -- your own interest is a pre-selection. It has already moved the auction out of the zero bids category. Something which *you* are interested in is likely to be something which many in this newsgroup are interested in.

The zero bids are things which did not attract *anyone*.

Now -- if you took your sample with randomly selected eBay auction numbers which you did not bother to determine whether they were of interest to you until *after* they were selected for the statistic, then you could have more reasonable statistics. Go for 100 auctions, and of those, pick ten which you will bid (a small amount) on even though they are not of interest to you, and see whether they have similar statistics.

Enjoy, DoN.

I think posting the identities of bidders was leading to bogus second chance offers. What's currently driving me nuts is the default "best match" search which I constantly have to change back to ending soonest. That and the "featured garbage" results which come before "closest distance", so if I'm looking for strength training equipment located nearby, I have to scroll through every piece of crap rubber band and abdominizer some scam artist is selling.

There is a California tool deal that is reputed to shill the shit out of their own auctions. A number of people are known to have kept records and done a considerable amount of back checking on this.

A very well known and allegedly Reliable Tool seller.

Gunner

"Upon Roosevelt's death in 1945, H. L. Mencken predicted in his diary that Roosevelt would be remembered as a great president, "maybe even alongside Washington and Lincoln," opining that Roosevelt "had every quality that morons esteem in their heroes.""

I don't do much ebay purchasing anymore, but when I do...

esniper is a simple, lightweight tool for sniping ebay auctions.