I just made my first bid on e-bay!
I’m the only bidder so far and the auction ends in 4 hours. And that’s exactly the problem. I’ll be out of the house for the last two hours of the auction - what if someone outbids me? I cannot figure out how to raise my maximum bid anywhere, and a higher max bid would make my chance of walking off with this item that I’ve been looking for for ages higher.
Anyone able to guide me?
-Tikster
All you need to do is place another bid that’s higher than the maximum that you set, then it will raise your maximum bid for you by replacing the previous one with the new one.
Just bid again!
Thanks!
Well I thought that might be it (of course I’m saying that) - but I was afraid I might start a silly bidding war with myself 
-Tikster
You may be confused—
The system will not let you overpay. If you are the only bidder at the moment–and no more bidders show up—you’ll get it at your original price.
You may raise your maximum bid, in which case ‘proxy bidding’ wil raise your bid progressively as other bidders show up.
But if you bid $1, and now you’ve raised your bid to $10, it will only change from the original $1 as other bidders bid. At that point the ebay system will start bidding automatically in your behalf to keep you 50 cents above the next bidder----up to $10.
Make any sense?
Yup, lots of sense - How the maximum bid works wasn’t a mystery - the lack of a “raise your max bid” link in MyEbay confused me
Ooooh, so giddy - hope I win!*
-Tikster
*I’ve looked at it before, but as soon as the items’ shipped overseas it’s usually very expensive tries to block the view for other overseas customers MY item!
By the way, if you’re going to rely on automatic proxy bidding, it’s a good idea to bid just a few dollars over your intended maximum, especially if your maximum falls on a common dollar amount (e.g. $10, $15, $100, $150, etc.).
The reason for this is that a lot of people like to wait until the very last minute to place a higher bid in an attempt to beat other bidders and they will often try uncommon amounts like $150.42 to beat the $150 that you may have placed. eBay encourages people to bid their “true maximum” and that’s generally a good idea, but if you’re bidding on a $150 item, it’s probably worth it to raise your max just a little higher than you intended to pay so you don’t end up losing the auction by a mere $2.48 or something
I agree, and I also bid in odd ammounts, like $26.53. But it is impossible to tell if you lost an auction by $2.48 by looking at the winning bid compared to your own. The winning bid does not reflect the bidder’s own maximum, so by the definition of proxy bidding, you will always appear to lose by the minimum bidding increment. If I bid $26.53, and the winning bidder actually bid $70.00, his winning bid will be 27.03. There is no way for me to know whether I missed winning the auction by .50, or by $43.47.
Sure. But this is meant to account for SMALL differences – if his max bid was twice as high as yours, of course he’s going to win
This statement seems to conceal a hidden assumption that might not be valid - that someone’s “maximum price” is a value that really exists in their head, and is not subject to changes over time during the auction. People are not generally that rational. My estimation of the value of the item might vary, not just by the bidding of other people, but subjective factors that are hard to measure. As far as that goes, something completely rational (discovering new information, or a similar item breaking,) might increase my ‘maximum bid’ during an auction.
Of course, if you weren’t meaning to imply anything different, then I apologize. Got a bit of an impression of “well, if you’d followed the guidelines and bid enough to start, then you wouldn’t be in this pickle” from a few people’s replies.