(By “shilling” I mean using accomplices or secondary accounts to artificially raise the price in an auction)
I’m not really asking how widespread it is - I’m sure even individual sellers get up to minor scams like this - but we’ve all seen these professional eBay sellers, the sort of small businesses who sell thousands of items and have their own stores an so forth, doing this thing where they sell the same item through an auction with a low starting price and simultaneously through a separate Buy It Now with a higher price. Bid on the auction and you will be outbid by a mysterious bidder who bids up to, or very near to, the Buy It Now price… :dubious:
One tries to avoid the suspicion that the other bidder is a shill, but it is hard. I imagine that they feel the need to place the same item as a low-starting-price auction in order to attract people looking for ridiculous bargains.
Now, all this doesn’t really bother me, I’m talking about low value items here, but if you read the official eBay rules and blogs and other material, they go on about how they have measures to detect shill bidding, and it’s not actually that common, bla bla bla. Seems to me that it is in fact common, and is probably automated and routine for large-scale sellers who know what they’re doing. Are they using software that can automatically do all this stuff?
You are looking at it backwards. The large-scale sellers are the least likely to shill. They cannot risk being banned because this is their long-term marketplace. They have enough buyers that they are able to stay in business as large-scale sellers. The reason people bid nearly up to the Buy It Now price is because the Buy It Now price has been set to be just above what buyers are historically buying it at. Buyers aren’t going to bid any higher than the Buy It Now price, are they? If the price were to reach the BIN price, they would be better off just going to a new listing and BIN. The reason the bidding comes just about up to the BIN price is BECAUSE a BIN price has been set.
It’s the newer sellers who are dumb and naive enough to believe they’ll get away with it.
I currently make 100% of my income from online sales.
What needscoffee said is pretty much spot on.
Ebay has some sophisticated back-room systems looking at their auction data for shilling, and has a number of ways of catching you.
I can’t risk losing my selling privileges on any of the venues I sell on; even a 2-week suspension would result in thousands in lost revenue, and an outright banning from the selling venue would quite literally bankrupt me.
Another angle is that while you might get away with shilling on a few items, if you’re selling several thousand items per week, the odds of continuing to get away with it are low… and the rewards are not worth it.
Anyway, if you’re really concerned about getting top dollar for your items, you shouldn’t be doing auctions… you should be making them into store items.
I’ve got a collectible product that will routinely selling for about $13 on auction… or $50 if I put it in my Ebay store and accept that it’ll take 6 to 24 months to sell.
OK, that is reassuring. What makes me suspicious is when the initial bid in the auction sale appears immediately. Or if there are no bids, and you bid, suddenly someone appears who is prepared to bid it up to the price in the other sale. But I guess if the volumes are big enough and there are enough potential buyers, that is possible.
You do realize that a buyer can enter in both an initial bid and a maximum bid ceiling amount, and this maximum amount will automatically and continuously challenge and beat your bids until you exceed it. The ebay bid process software is what is challenging your bids in these instances, not the buyer personally.
On the first count, some folks do search for ‘newest’ auctions in a category.
On the second count, I think you may misunderstand how bidding works on Ebay.
This page may clarify: http://pages.ebay.com/help/buy/automatic-bidding.html
On edit:
Also, you’re leaving money on the table unless you use a sniping service on Ebay.
EZSniper works for me, but other options work equally well. That’s another thread, really.
Yes, I understand how the maximum bid mechanism works. I use it myself all the time. But my observation is that an initial bid (possibly with an associated maximum amount) appears immediately, almost like somebody was expecting the auction to commence.
And I know about sniping too. I have a sniping account. I am not a complete rube. What I am talking about is when you see an item, watch it for a few days, and there are no bids. Then you put in a bid say two days before the end of the sale, and almost immediately another bid appears. Not just before the end of the auction, within minutes. Test that bid, and lo and behold, it goes right up to the Buy It Now price that that seller had on another page.
It smacks of an automated bid-watching system.
I used another online auction years ago that didn’t allow sniping. If someone bid in the last few minutes the auction end time was extended 30 minutes. That gives the losing bidder time to bid again.
That’s a win win for seller and buyer. It’s idiotic to refuse someones bid because of a silly end time. Real life auctions don’t end until the last bid. Sellers love bidding wars. More money for them. As a buyer I feel cheated when someone snipes something I wanted. But, I doubt Ebay will ever change.
It’s probably the soonest auction that doesn’t currently have bids. If you went to an unbid auction further down the page, you’d probably not have any other people bidding. Plus, people generally don’t bid more than 2 or 3 days out, you and other like-minded bidders. There’s no point to bidding further out. Then once you’ve bid, the automatic bidding kicks in to raise the price to the bidders’ stated maximum bid, which will be close to the BIN price. Nobody will put their maximum bid equal to or higher than the BIN price, which is pretty much the price that tells them how high they should place their maximum bid.
But then you have the same problem 30 minutes later.
The simple way around this is to enter your ***highest ***maximum bid. If you are willing to go higher to beat the other bid, you should just put it in in the first place. But since doing that will then make other people put in a higher bid, you’re better off not entering that maximum bid until the very end.
People who are not old hands at ebay bidding think there is something underhanded about sniping, but there isn’t. It’s simply the most sensible way to put in your maximum bid without giving others the chance to respond by raising theirs.
Why would ebay care about shill bidding? They take a percentage of the haul.
I understand why the policy would be against it, but can’t imagine much enforcement actually happens. :dubious:
Shilling doesn’t work over the long term. As another poster said, it’s easy to get away with one or two times or every now and then but it really doesn’t work as a long term technique because not only do you have eBay looking but you have eBay members looking and your competition is also looking to report you. Remember less competition is better for them.
If you go to Google Groups and look up Alt Marketing Online eBay and so some searches you can see why shilling doesn’t really work as a long term thing.
[Note: That usenet group is pretty much dead, but you can search old articles in the group]
But that’s exactly why sniping is underhanded. In any real world auction there’s no such thing as “no chance to counter-bid”. I’ve all but abandonned eBay due to the proliferation of snipers. Their loss, not mine.
ebay does have a built-in alert mechanism that notifies buyers (email or other ways) when a new listing appears. For example, I “subscribe” to ebay’s alert system and instruct it to notify me of new listings of certain keywords such as, “old leather book antique”
However, if you’re seeing initial bids within 2 seconds of the listing, then I’m not sure the ebay alert mechanism is that fast.
There’s also 3rd party software that can automatically monitor ebay on behalf of the buyer.
Just look at it as a different form of auction with different rules, just as how a silent auction is different from a live auction, etc. If you simply wait until almost the end of the auction to place your bid, your highest maximum bid, you’ll win, unless someone else had a higher maximum bid. And you can determine what the highest maximum bid should be by looking at the “completed auction history” to see how much the item has been selling for. It actually works out to be a very simple way to buy an item without having to keep checking the listing to see where the current price is. You place one bid, at the end of the listing period. And if you are unable to be there at that time, you use a program to place your bid for you at that time. Many people prefer to just do Buy It Now purchases nowadays to make things even simpler.
Again, that’s a problem because to me, there’s no such thing as a predetermined maximum bid.
Example: there’s a model train from the 1970’s I’d like to bid on. It’s not a super valuable item but it has sentimental value to me. It’s worth $200 in the collector’s guide book. I think that’s overpriced, to me it’s worth $50. So I set my maximum bid to $50. Sure enough in the last few minutes someone bids $51. To a person who believes in absolutes, they’ve been outbid and that’s that. But to me, I could be persuaded to bid $52. Then they bid $53. Okay, I relent and bid $58. I win.
Now you ask why didn’t I set my max to $58. Because in a cold analysis I normally wouldn’t have said it was worth $58. But in the heat of actual auction I would surpass that"ceiling".
In the sniper world, I lose because his automated bid swoops in and that’s the end of the bidding. The sniper wins with $51, but the seller could have gotten my $58.
In my ideal eBay world, the main auction stops at the proscribed auction end time. Then there’s a 15 minute window for counterbidding. If there is a new bid, the clock gets pushed back another 15 minutes. Repeat until a 15 minute block passes without a counterbid. But as another poster said, eBay will never change.