I hope nobody flogs me for asking such a stupid question, but I have respect for you all and I know I will get some straight answers.
I am newbie on e-bay and recently put an item up for sale. I won’t name it because my intention is not to draw people to the auction through the board (just thought I would throw that in). Anyway, I put a reserve price on the item and have had no bids, but well over 200 hits. Tomorrow is the last day for the sale and I have had several e-mail questions and such. One person e-mailed and came real close to what I have on the reserve price (like within a dollar). But they want me to close the auction early.
Why won’t this person just bid on the item? More than likely they will get it with no other bidders. Does this hurt me as a seller if I do close the auction early. Could this person have other intentions that I might not be thinking about?
Sorry to the moderators in advance if I am in the wrong forum for this. Bows down ever so humble.
I can’t answer your question as to why the person would do that, but you should be wary about selling items to people that aren’t official auctions – eBay will do nothing to help you if the buyer won’t pay, and what that person was asking you to do is basically against their terms of service (ending auctions early and then selling outside the auction – it keeps eBay from collecting the auction closings fees.)
Lots of people wait until the last minute to bid. Just be patient.
Your reserve might be too high - hence lots of views and no bids.
I will not close an auction early for someone - they can bid if they really want the item. You lose all eBay protections when you deal off eBay, it’s not worth it to me.
One auction I had a guy email me and he offered $50 for me to close early, I said no and the item closed at $77. I think the E-mailer knew it would go higher than $50 and wanted to get a deal (I had admitted in the auction I didn’t know much about the item, it was an antique) and I am happy I didn’t go for his offer. Sometimes people wait to bid until the last minute - if it closes with no bids, your reserve was too high.
Thats all they’re trying to do. Don’t do it for the reasons mentioned.
Personally, I never reserve a price and let the market dictate. Try to do some research first on what the item has gone for in the past if possible. If they’ve been going for at a price you’d be happy with, be a rebel and start at .01. The insert fee will cost less and you’ll still almost certainly get what you want out of it.
You all have brought up valid points and some I hadn’t even thought about. I won’t be ending the auction early. If the person wants it they are going to have to bid. I just needed someone to back up what my inner gut was telling me. This should be interesting on how it turns out. Thank you fellow dopers for the advice!
If you close the auction early, you won’t have the protection of EBay if something get’s screwed up. If you really want to sell it to the person and you’re not worried about the dollar. You could possibly, tell them to bid the extra dollar but that you’ll only charge them what the bid is currently at. I’ll bet they’ll come up with a reason to have you send the product before they pay for it as well. (DON’T) Remember, you’re the seller, you make the rules.
With most items, it seems 90% of the bidding action is in the final five minutes. Some folks use “sniping” software, others, like me, just watch the item they’re interested in and hit “Bid” with five seconds to go. (It helps to sync your PC’s clock to eBay’s)
If nothing else, it protects against bid-nibbling. For example - my maximum bid’s $20, and the item has an opening price of $5 and a bidder sees it with my $5 bid and puts in for $7, not knowing what my max is. Not enough. They bid $10. Not enough. They bid $15. Not enough. They give up. Meanwhile, my max bid of $20 has been nibbled up to $15 from $5.
Reversal: The nibbler sees the item with no bids and bids $5 and has the high bid. In the final seconds, I snipe with a $20 bid and get it for $5.25, saving me ten bucks.
If your item does not sell, you can re-list for free. In this case, I’d suggest reducing the reserve, unless you’re dead-set against selling for any less.
Never end an auction early, especially at the request of a bidder. You always get the highest bids in the last minutes or even seconds of an auction. Bidders that ask you to end it early know this, and are trying to short circuit the “snipers” who wait until the last seconds to outbid everybody.
Patience grasshopper; if you auction it, they will come.
The reason they are asking you to end early is because they’re hoping you might agree to do so in order to avoid the closing fees. I imagine that kind of thing happens quite a bit. Personally, I have never closed an auction early; I’ve found that I get a higher price by letting it run its course. And often, the person who asked you to close it early will end up bidding anyway when they realize you aren’t going to do so. Even if they don’t bid, and let’s say your item doesn’t sell, nothing is preventing you from offering the item to that person after the auction closes. So I can’t really see much advantage in ending your auction early.
Also consider this: eBay is very fickle. Sometimes if you re-list an item that didn’t sell, it will sell the second time around. I listed an item with a reserve of $200, and it didn’t sell. So I re-listed it, and lowered the reserve to $150, and it ended up selling for $400 the second time around! You never know what’s going to happen.
That was my first thought, but the buyer doesn’t have to worry about any of the fees. (OTOH if the seller asked to end the auction early, it would bypass some fees, as well as the auction being protected under ebays rules.)
Why would anyone ever want to put in a reserve (or a high opening price? It seems to me that these just discourage bidders, and the same could be accomplished by bidding on the item yourself. IOW, suppose you won’t sell the item for less than $100. Instead of opening bidding or setting the reserve at that price, you open low with no reserve. If the price doesn’t get high enough, you (or your associate) bid the price up to that point.
Is there some reason that this would not work? Or is it some violation of the rules?
I don’t think you can bid on your own goods even if you tried. You could use and associate or alias I suppose, but besides being unethical it is a definite no-no in the least. Heck, it might even be illegal let alone against the rules.
It’s also possible that the bidder will “pay” beforehand but end up bouncing a check, using a stolen credit card or reversing payment through Paypal. The seller then cannot leave feedback or reporting the bidder as a nonpayer because it wasn’t an official eBay transaction.
Private sales are the preferred method of scammers and should be approached with extreme caution.
Again, I’ve never done it, but I assume those people are thinking it’s mutually beneficial. The seller avoids the fees, and the buyer gets the item at an agreed price. The buyer would be the one taking all the risk, since the seller can hang on to the item until payment is received, and the buyer would have no official recourse if they didn’t get what they wanted. To me though, ending auctions early seems dishonest and unfair to the other potential bidders (as well as unfair to eBay), causes you to miss out on possible higher bids (bids tend to come in at the last minute of an auction), and would only save you a nominal amount in fees. And if everyone did that, eBay would be out of business.
noddygrrl:
You should never send an item until the check clears. And on the PayPal thing, once a payment has cleared into your PayPal account, can they take the money away from you? I wasn’t aware that they can do that. When I get a PayPal payment, it will show the status, and indicate when the payment is confirmed. I had assumed it’s my money at that point. Am I wrong?
If the buyer uses a stolen credit card and the owner reports it, the credit card issuer can do a charge back against PayPal, who will in turn, withdraw the money from your PayPal account. Many people blame PayPal, but they are just passing on the loss from the credit card company; should they be expected to just eat the loss? Incidentally, buyers can initiate chargebacks on their own for the flimsiest of reasons, and the credit card companies will enforce them. Fraudulent buyers end with with the merchandise and the money; losses of this kind are a cost of doing business. Wecome to online commerce.
Well if it’s against the rules then it’s against the rules, but I don’t really see why it should be unethical. Essentially you are failing to disclose that you have a reserve.
I wonder if the ethical issue comes up with people who use shills for a different purpose - to create an artificial bidding frenzy, in an attempt to suck people in emotionally. But OTOH, that’s what these auctions are all about anyway, for many people - otherwise each person would generally bid only once per item. Getting caught up in a bidding war is a pitfall that is present in many auctions. If someone approaches it rationally, and pays only what they are willing to pay, the shill’s bid makes no real difference.
(All this is assuming - as I am - that the seller does not know the maximum bid of the buyer. But I can’t imagine that he does).
Of course it does. What if you are the only bidder other than the “shill”. The item is minutes away from going at $5 but then the shill bidder drives it to, say, $30. Sure, you’re still willing to pay $30 if you want it, but you should have got it for $5.
In my mind, that makes it unethical and ripping off the sucessful bidder at the very least.
Had someone reverse a Paypal payment when I was running eBay auctions for a charity ….