Online Auctions - Pet Peeves & Positives

Yeah, the reserve price makes no sense and is probably one of my biggest pet peeves. It (sometimes) works in live auctions but is pretty useless on eBay.

on ebay you don't know the buyer's highest bid is so sometimes another buyer may place a ridiculous bid hoping he/she will outbid the other person.

[Super]

To me, other bidders are not even in the equation until the Reserve Price is met. Up until then you are bidding against the Seller until such time the Reserve is met, if it is met and it doesn't matter how many other bidders their are until then.

If a Reserve is set at $110 and I put in as the highest bid I will go at $105 the Seller never knows he may have missed out on a sale nor will I know that I was only $5 under. The only thing that will show is that my bid lists only as $1 higher than the last bidder. So if the highest bidder was $10 the Seller only sees the next bid at $11 and never knows he was that close to a sale if the auction ended with the Reserve met. Now, if the Seller Started the Auction at $110 with no Reserve I would have been more inclined to add the $5 to start the bidding off. So in my opinion the Reserve is a big waste of time for all concerned with no advantage.

[Super]

As A Buyer
It really frosts my knuckles when I see the nickle and dimers jump in at the beginning of an Auction, especially when these bidders are new to Online Auctions. These 'New-Bee's' as I call them start bidding early with minimum bids and continue bidding the minimum whenever someone out bids them. This becomes even more irritating when you get several 'New-Bee's trying to 'one up' each other driving the price of the item up and up. I have coined this the 'New-Bee Wars'. These bidders keep bidding the bare minimum so they can be on top but there is still six days left in the Auction. This can continue even when the price of the Auction is driven quite high at which time these bidders become 'Pot Committed' to coin a Poker Term and continue to out bid each other by the minimum. I guess they think by bidding 25cents over the last bid will scare them away. Once again these types of strategy may work in a live, Auction House type auction but doesn't work Online. New-Bee Wars happen often on Ebay but its way more prevalent in the Japan Auctions where you can see, early in a listing, 20 or 30 bids on an item and the price has only reached 550yen.

As A Seller
I love the 'New-Bee Wars'

Honestly, I love to this type of bidding pattern...
2 or 3 bidders in the dark with peashooters trying to win an auction for the absolute minimum, trying to save a few dollars to try and get a better deal than the price an item deserves...when I see these inexperience bidders aggressively acting to remain high bidder, only to see their max bids revealed by another max bid of the smallest of incriments, (yes just like online poker) That's when the excitement of the kill and conquer adrenaline kicks in...They have no idea they were being stalked behind the otherside of the screen, their tendencies studied, and a game plan formulated to go "over the top" with a bid 3x more than either would ever pay, dropped like a bomb with only 5 seconds left to go...Like an "all in call" with the "nuts" kinda feeling!!
I live for the newbies!! Lol

[Super]

Thats only if your New-Bees are reasonable bidders, more times than not, at least with me, the New-Bee Wars take the Auction way above the items worth or the amount I think its worth to me. And they don't stop as they figure that if they can pay $100 for an item they can go over a mere $5 more of the last highest bid which is the minimum at that point and it goes on and on with the other New-Bees in the hunt. I agree with you on that method of swooping in at the last minute and stun a New-Bee bidder but that would only come into play if the Auction had not surpassed the value of the item and your willingness to pay.

[Super]

As A Buyer
Sellers that don't realize how important it is to buyers when they start their Auctions. This pertains to the USA Ebay but also could be happening in your country especially if your country has multiple time zones. For example a seller on the west coast of the States stays up late and lists their items at 2:00am, their time, which means that the auction then ends at 5:00am on the east coast. Makes it very hard to be a last minute bidder at that time. The opposite is also true, when an east coast seller lists an auction at 7:00 am it will end at 4:00am on the west coast. What I like to do in my auctions as I am on the east coast is list my items between 9:00 & 11:00pm, my time, so they end between 6:00 & 8:00pm on the west coast. I believe this gives the east coast bidders a chance to give a last minute bid while they are home in the evening and before they go to bed at the same time giving the last minute bidders on the west coast a chance to get in their bids as they should be home from work by then. I can't tell you how many times I have had to set my alarm clock for 4:00am just because the sellers don't realize that the time the auction ends might mean a sale or a sale at a higher price giving more bidders a chance. Believe it or not I have seen sellers in my own time zone list their items at 2:00 or 3:00am. They sure must not realize that just because they are up at that time most all other, sober, buyers are not.

In a related peeve...sellers that bulk list their listings at the same time or close to the same time. This makes them end at or very close to the same times. So if you are interested in several of their items its near impossible to make last minute bids on them.

...They sure must not realize that just because they are up at that time most all other, sober, buyers are not.

True, but for drunken insomniacs it's a bonanza of bargains and indiscriminate spending!

Or so I've heard....

[Super]

AS A BUYER:

Why must eBay have a section under Purchase History to remind me of the auctions I didn't win? I lost, I don't have the items, so why continue to taunt me about it?