This is the way the old onsale.com auctions used to work(before they got bought out and became a retail site), and it seemed very reasonable. From the seller’s standpoint, it meant that the auction stayed open until the market set the best price. From the buyer’s perspective, you couldn’t get sniped and had an opportunity to place your highest bid. Win-win. I never understood why eBay used a time limit.
Interesting idea. But wouldn’t that just result in a bidding system where those with the most time, rather than the most money, won? Bidders would just sit there, out bidding each other in carefully timed and tiny increments, until one got fed up or had to log off. Meanwhile the seller’s not making any money.
I think onsale.com had a minimum increment. I don’t think they let you bid cents, only dollars, but it may have depended on the current bid (i.e. allow increments of 5, 10, or 20 cents for low price items, increments of 1, 5, or even 10 dollars for very high priced items). Onsale.com had a number of rules like this which seemed completely fair but also make it clear this was a business, not a game. I imagine any loophole that allowed silliness like you describe would have been closed in short order.
Still have proxy bidding to fall back on; enter your absolute, drop-dead, not-a-penny-more bid, and if someone else keeps bidding, yours moves up accordingly.
Except in this case, the 'current winning bid" was shown to be $18. The “other guy” tried to 'snipe"- and apparently coinidentall-, entered a snipe bid that was just below our OPs max. That of course raised our OP’s open bid to his max, but at no time was our OP outbid and at no time was our 'sniper" the high bidder. In other words, all his “snipe” did was raise the bid up. He 'sniped" but missed!
Shill bidders usually appear as "nibblers’- something many new eBay bidders do anyway. They look at the “high bid”- and bid $1 over it- find out they are out bid, then keep on going. This is a bad bidding practice, but dudes still do it, even after they should know better. Thus, it is very hard to see if you have been “shilled” unless the “nibbler” has done that on several of that sellers auctions.
In stuyguy’s case here, I vote “pure coincidence” especially as the possible 'shill" has a clean bidding record.
IMHO- there is no real advantage to be gained by sniping anyway. It does prevent “nibblers” but they are rare. Best way is to input your high bid then don’t worry about it until the auction has ended.
As far as retractions go, I once accidentally made a mistake (not quite like the one somebody else mentioned with a forgotten decimal, but a similar typoish thing) and retracted it. They retracted it immediately. This was about three years ago, though, so I don’t know if they’ve changed how long it takes now. But a retraction then was instantaneous. I’d imagine it still is, or else they’d run into problems with an overly excited bidder with large fingers and no “dialing wand” making a mistake in their bid in the last seconds and screwing everything up.
What’s wrong with nibbling? That is, why is it a bad bidding process? I don’t actually do this, but I don’t think I would care if someone else did - if I’ve entered my maximum, then that’s what I’m willing to pay - if the price jumps up or creeps up, it makes no difference, no?
Agreed (with Y rather small - say 5 minutes). Note that this is how live auctions work (but there, Y = a few seconds).
That would be true if each auction occurred in a vacuum. But for a variety of reasons, it is not always reasonable to bid your absolute maximum in the first place. Often, there are numerous similar items up for auction. If I am willing to pay $x for one of them, I can’t just enter $x as my maximum bid on multiple auctions, because I might win more than one. Furthermore, I know that other people are likely using similar bidding strategies, which makes sniping a more attractive strategy.
If you are bidding on multiple auctions for the same item at the same time, the possibility always remains that you will win more than one.
The drawback to last minute sniping is that, if you do it right, you only get one chance; if the high bidder is using proxy bidding, your snipe falls short, and you don’t have time to bid again. Snipers may get lower prices on the auctions they win, but they end up losing more auctions than proxy bidders. YMMV
If your intention is not to win, then why bid at all?
That shouldn’t be an issue, because there’s absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t bid the absolute highest amount you would be willing to pay in one single bid. The proxy bidding will take care of the rest. If you lose the auction, that just means that the bidding went higher than the absolute maximum you would be willing to pay. It’s best to decide your maximum when you are cool-headed. If you get caught up in a frenzy and start to second-guess yourself, you’re gonna end up overpaying.
I agree, I was just trying to frame the argument in terms of iamthewalrus(:3’s previous point.
What possible point is there to bidding in an auction that you don’t hope or intend to win?
Other than shilling, of course.
Kind of like what blowero said. Now I bother to look.
I think what walrus is saying is that, for example, you might be willing to spend $30 on a widget, and you might like to have as many as 4 widgets, but you don’t want to spend more than $100. So, if you entered 4 widget auctions and put in $30 as your max bid, you could end up on the hook for $120, which you want to avoid. So maybe instead you bid $30 in two auctions, and $20 in two others. That way, you couldn’t spend more than $100 total. But if you win those first two auctions at $25, you now have 10 extract dollars to allocate to the other two, so you can change your bids there.
I did this once when an opposing bidder pissed me off by outbidding me on a bunch of different car parts auctions.
The high bid was showing $50.00. As it turned out the high bidder had put in a proxy of $75.00. From $25.00 to $99.00, the bids are done in increments of $1.00.
I put in a bid of $60.00, which was the maximum amount I wanted to pay and the other guy’s proxy bid kicked in making the high bid $61.00. I decided to try and make the other guy pay the maximum amount. I put in a bid for $61.48 (or some other odd ‘cents’ amount like that). The max bid went up to $62.48. I went in 50 cent incremements until I put in $73.48. The maximum bid went to $74.48. When I put in $74.98, the maximum bid went to $75.00 even. Because the max bid only went to $75.00, I knew I’d hit his proxy bid because the max bid didn’t go up to $75.98.
This didn’t benefit me in any way except for getting the satisfaction of making the guy pay $75.00 for something he could’ve had for $61.00. After I did that, there were no more bidding wars from that guy. 
I used Ebay on two occassions to buy software and felt that I was “bid up” somehow. In both cases I made bids in the last minute or so on items which had very few bids, and which were stable at around $20.00. In the first case I bid $50.00 with a maximum bid of about $125.00 on a Microsoft Office program. Somehow, I was bid up to 124.90 in the last seconds of the auction. The second instance involved a contact manager program and the experience was similiar. The bid “stable bid” amount had been around $30.00 throughout most of the auction (and indeed I saw a number of closed auctions where the program had sold from around $40 to $70.00 dollars). I bid $40.00 with a maximum bid of $150.00 and left to make some phone calls (with about three minutes left in the auction). When I returned I learned that I had won the auction with a bid of 149.00 (still cheaper than the $200.00 retail, but on second thought I probably would have waited to buy the program if I really felt the auction would have gone that high).
The bottom line is that I think many really experienced Ebay, professional sellers have methods of discovering your high bid and exploiting it to their benefit. Of course I cannot prove this, but it has definitely made me less likely to use Ebay. Also, I had an instance where I legitimately made a decimal error and bid $250.00 for program that I intended to bid only $25.00 dollars for. Unfortunately, the auction ended seconds later before I was able to retract and bid (It was my second time using Ebay, and I was still unfamiliar with the program). Somehow the bid was almost instantly bid up to $249.00 even before I could retract my bid (obviously or it would not have mattered). I sent an email to the seller immediately that I didn’t want to purchase the item and to the Ebay staff. The seller was insistent that I purchase the product and said that if I didn’t he would complain to Ebay, and pursue aggressive legal action against me and would place it against my credit. In the end I ended up “giving” him $50.00 dollars (and not getting the program) to make him go away (I wouldn’t have done this but for the fact that my wife insisted that it wasn’t worth the risk of hurting our credit).
I realize that Ebay is a good service, but these experiences have contributed to my not wanting to use this service on a regular basis. I simply don’t “trust” that good will is present by a significant percentage of the sellers in the marketplace. In addition, I feel that those who are relatively uninformed (as compared with the pros) are at a huge disadvantage in this marketplace (of course this is true in any marketplace, but I feel the effect is greater in this online environment) By contrast, I have purchased items out of The Trader for many years and have seldom (if ever) had a bad experience.
If you have time after the first two auctions to re-bid in the second two auctions, why bother to place those first $20 bids? Why not just place your initial bid at that time? What does that first redundant $20 bid do, other than drive up the price?
Perhaps they do it the way jasonh300 just described. I would think it would be possible to write an automated bidding program that would repeatedly bid the minimum increment, each time checking the high bid, until the high bid returns an even number (or a different number of cents after the decimal point). It makes sense that if people are doing that, they’re not gonna admit it here on a public message board. That sure would be an obnoxious thing to do, by the way.
Wow, can you really put a mark on someone’s credit report for that? I’d sure like to know how to do that, because I’m sick to death of deadbeats who place winning bids on my auctions and then don’t pay. Ebay doesn’t do jack shit about it, either. I file complaints, and get absolutely no response from eBay. Their FAQ says that non-paying bidders might get a “strike”, and if they get enough “strikes”, they might get banned. And even with that incredibly weak system of enforcement, the strikes go away after time. Non-paying bidders know that there will be absolutely no consequences for their behavior, because eBay’s got no balls. So they just keep doing it. I would love to have some sort of recourse against these people.
I’m sorry you got caught up in that though, Roland, because yours sounds like a legitimate mistake. I’ve had it happen several times when it was obviously no mistake, and not only did they not fess up (which at least you did right away), they just stopped responding, so I ended up wasting a bunch of time waiting for them to respond to my emails when they had no intention of ever paying. One guy even promised to pay and then started ignoring me, just to drag the process out even further. Sounds like you paid the price for these deadbeats who have caused everyone to just be fed up with non-payers.
I just had a thought: Maybe this rash of non-paying winning bidders are actually schills who accidentally won the auction while trying to discover what the high bid was