I was looking around on ebay tonight, and I stumbled onto some watches. There is a seller that lives in Japan that has some great pre-owned watches in both Omega and Breitling.
Assuming for a moment the items are genuine, (and his feedback is high enough to imply that the items are indeed genuine), how do I interpret the bids currently shown for each watch.
Here’s the thing… each watch is put out at no reserve, meaning a 1 dollar bid would win a 4 thousand dollar watch. This never happens, of course. But the interesting thing is in the 4 auctions I’ve looked at, the top three bidders all have multiple retracted bids for not only this item, but for the past 6 months.
I thought bid retractions were frowned on and would be used very infrequently, but in each instance, each person had a number of retractions.
So how does this work from a sellers POV? I’ve never sold on ebay, but I’m assuming that many of the bids on the watch are shill bids, and the bids are retracted until the seller hits on the last legitimate bidder. If that bidder is over his price, he’ll sell the watch, if not, one of his “shills” wins, and the watch goes back out for sale.
I know I sound skeptical, and ebay supposed to guard against this sort of thing, but 1) ebay doesn’t care about shill bidding, and 2) it becomes truly impossible to track, since ebay alters the username of each bidder to make them anonymous.
So is this what is actually going on (the seller has shill bidders and sells to the highest legit bidder), or is something else going on?
If you know how eBay’s proxy bidding system works … I suspect that the bid retractors are “testing the waters” to see what the true bid of someone else.
Bid retracting is supposed to be for a mistake (I once left out the decimal point), but these people are using it to gain an unfair advantage to see what the true bid of the high-bidder is.
I do indeed know how the proxy bidding system works… and what you say makes sense, especially on very expensive items like vehicles. But forgetting a decimal point is an honest mistake and one thing… repeatedly bidding above the high bidder to drive up the price of the item to meet the high bidder’s proxy bid is something else.
Don’t sellers have the final say in whether or not the bid is retracted? Or does eBay? I figure ebay wouldn’t want to get involved if it didn’t have to. However, someone who has a history of this behavior should not be permitted to continue to bid. I guess eBay doesn’t see it that way… So can I bid $50K on a car to find the reserve price, back out, and do it 30 times a day?
How do you know they have retracted bids? Bidder identity is hidden, as you said. Got a link to the auctions?
In any case, if the bid really was too low, the seller just wouldn’t sell. He’d just claim the item was no longer available or cancel the bidding at the last moment, or whatever. Both are frowned upon, of course, if done to any extrent.
Ebay will jump on you if you retract more than 3 or so bids in some period.
I would never buy a high end watch for this reason. There is only one watch I’ve never seen a replica on, and that’s the Omega x-33… which is what I’ve been checking out on ebay. I look at other watches just for the hell of it.
I firmly believe that ebay doesn’t do anything to anyone. they want to maximize their profits, so shill bidding is encouraged (ebay denies it of course).
To see the history of a particular bidder, just click on their ebay-encoded id, and it will show you their history. even though you don’t know who it is, exactly, you can see that particular person’s history.
Ebay has a great business model. They are unethical as anything, but they figure out how to squeeze every dollar they can out of people.
These people aren’t bidding to drive up the price, they’re bidding to find out the proxy bid of other bidders. Assuming they bid absurdly high, they retract their fake bid after they find out the other guy’s proxy bid. Once a bid is retracted, the high bid reverts to what it was before the fake bid.
People are supposed to know how much they’re willing to pay for an item, but a lot of bidders (my guess: 40%) base their bid on what others are bidding. Personally, I highly recommend using a sniping service, but you have to know how much you’re willing to pay. If you’re willing to pay $78 for an item, don’t cry if someone bids $78.01. If you really were willing to bid $80, then you should have bid it. (I always add 12 cents to my high bid to outbid the snipers who bid $78.01). With a sniping service, one can retract their bid because the bid doesn’t reach eBay until the last 10 seconds of an auction.
Most eBay bidders bid for a bargain and hope for a win (and they get pissed if a sniper outbids them). Snipers bid for a win and hope for a bargain.
If the seller had final say in bid retractions, you might as well eliminate bid retractions. If I were held to $1234 instead of my intended bid of $12.34, I’d get myself a new eBay ID.
Well…not going to answer your direct question but just throw out my experience with ebay.
A few years ago I did quite a bit of Ebay’ing and, at first , I did their auto bid feature. However, I noticed that when I did this, I seemed to win the item but at the top of my range.
So, I started doing it manually and not use the auto bid. I started winning at much lower prices but I also lost many more items. I also received more communications from the seller saying the buyer backed out/was flaky and would I take it at my last bid. {no, scum!}. I thought about shill bidders but many of these items didn’t have a large amount of bidders.
I contacted Ebay on this and they insisted that their system could not be gamed that way…so I decided to try myself. I was able to, once I had a bid in, be able to determine WITHOUT BIDDING AGAIN whether I was gooing to go over the top of another bidder in his auto bid and be highest bidder on the item. I then went back and loocked at the items I won at my highest price and, sure enough, the behavior looked the same.
I now assume that it can be done and never used auto-bid again.
Now, if you don’t use auto bid, then you have to use shill buyers to up the price. I am not naive…I assume 90%+ of the sellers out there use shills.
“Scum”? I don’t get it. If you were willing to pay a tenner for something and received a message offering to sell the item for a tenner, why turn it down because some other account bid more in the auction itself?
Because the “unreliable high bidder” was actually a shill of the seller, attempting to drive the price up. Fuck him, he can take the time and expense to re-list the item.
Another reason: After you realized this particular auction was getting out of control, you found a different auction offering the same item and decided to bid there.
Look, I sell on Ebay and Amazon extensively.
I do it full-time, and I have a picker that I employ full-time as well.
You seem to think that online selling venues they really value their sellers, because the venues value the profit that stems from the sales produced by the sellers.
They don’t, and they don’t have to.
If they shut my operation down this afternoon, my competitors, and they are legion, would just fill in the gap left by my missing merchandise.
If a watch is good enough and works well enough to fool an expert, then surely it’s good enough for me or you? Why should it matter who actually made it?