On an ebay item? Does this mean that even if your bid is the highest at the end of the auction, the seller doesn’t have to sell it to you at the price you’ve bid?
Or something else? If it means the first thing, why doesn’t the seller just tell you what his minimum selling price is and save everyone the trouble of going through the motions of an auction for no result?
That is what it means. A lot of people complain about the reserve price system. There is no benefit for buyers but there is one for sellers. If you have something that you want to determine the current E*Bay market worth of, you can set a really high reserve and get your information without having to sell the item for a lower price than you hoped. There is also the belief that some buyers will be suckered into bidding up even more when they find out their bid did not meet the reserve. Getting buyers to invest psychologically in an item is a common strategy to get higher bids than normal.
I hate the reserve system and won’t bother to bid on anything that has a reserve. (Although eBay lost its luster for me long ago and I rarely buy there any more anyway.)
There are lots of illogical/“psychological” factors involved in an auction - in practice an item with, say, a $1 minimum bid and a (hidden) $100 reserve is likely to draw more action than an item with a $100 minimum bid.
That’s true, because all those people bidding less than that $100 are unlikely to have bid at all in the $100 minimum auction. The real question is whether the item is more likely to sell if the $100 minimum is a secret, as it is in reserve-price auctions.
Reserve price auctions have been the norm in high-value auctions for ages. It’s not new to ebay. For example the Barrett-Jackson Classic Car auction is a reserve price auction.
As a former Ebay Power Seller I can tell you that the reserve is the only thing that kept me in business. Unfortunately if you are a seller of new items and you don’t use the reserve system you face the prospect of losing your shirt big time. If you are selling new and have a $100 in an item and the bids only reach $60, with no reserve you have to sell that item at $60 … a really bad way to stay in business.
OTOH starting the bidding at $100 is a physiological death wish. Even though the item will likely sell above $100, if the buyers don’t get a sense of “stealing” something they won’t bid. Even if they are prepared to spend more than the $100.
Now, this was very true in the early days of Ebay. In fact I used to call Ebay “the land of the stupid” because people would pay way over retail for an item because they got caught up in the bidding process. It was great for sellers like me, I made money as fast as I could ship the products. Unfortunately Ebay is not really an auction site any longer. The majority of my sales my last two years on Ebay were “Buy It Now” sales, where buyers purchased at a fixed price.
Reserve is OK to kill low ball bidding against the seller…easier for high volume retailers.
But, I never saw a reserve that wasn’t much lower than Retail/BuyNow Price…
EBAY is scammy anyway… from the few I bid on years ago.
I eventually found something a few years later for $100 on Craigslist that was once $800 on Ebay, that I had bought a few years before for $1200…
If you wanna know…
Well, because mine was stolen and was trying to find another…I probably bought my old one back…I still have the paperwork and serial from the last one. :dubious:
( a few years = 12)