I have never understood the “bidding early drives up the price” thing, the item is going to sell for what it’s going to sell for (what the market will bear) and if you think that you are “hiding” by not bidding, there are generally hit counters on the page and those are a pretty good indicator of interest.
Unclviny (E-bayer since '99, buying and selling, check my store!)
And yet, you have only to look at this thread to see that sometimes people are willing to bid more when others are also willing to bid.
The counters indicate the number of people who found the description of some interest – not how many people actually remain interested once they see it. I don’t find hit counters on most pages that I check out anyway.
The number of bids is the only thing listed on the search results screen that indicates “quality” or “interest” in the auction. Keeping that number down really can save you money, since the more bidders that are aware of an auction, the more likely that one of them has a higher price they’re willing to pay than you.
Nothing makes me madder* than planning to snipe an auction, then oversleeping and finding the auction to have closed for less than half of what I was willing to pay.
I agree that sniping is a pain, but I accept it as a way of Ebay life. What makes it more painful for me is that I am in Europe, whereas most of the auctions I am interested in are in the US. That means if I want to snipe (or just want to see the auction ending), I often have to wait til like 3 AM!
Another issue of etiquette (sort of): what about those people who list under the Antiques heading when the item they are selling isn’t an antique? Either they are clearly new being passed off as antique (with or without a made up antique age), or sometimes they even admit it is new! Why doesn’t Ebay do something about this? I have seen this many many times…
So, try out eSnipe. It even has a free trial period. Basically, you can enter into it ahead of time the auction that you’re interested in, your maximum bid, and the amount of time before auction end (in seconds) that it should place the bid. Then, go on to bed, and in the morning, it will either have won your auction for you, or you’ll have been outbid, which woulda happened anyway. No need to lose sleep to stay up for a snipe!
Heh, I’ve sniped in the past because I figured that everyone else was doing it. 
Of course, I’ve done the proxy thing on items that I was interested in, but wouldn’t fret if I was outbid.
FWIW, here’s my last strategy when i was active in eBay. (i’m sometimes a somewhat compulsive collector, so i’ve let my account stay suspended.)
and i agree about the odd-cents bid amounts.
I understood the reasoning behind it, I just find it disingenuous. I do look at negative feedbacks, but I also look at what a seller’s response is. If I see a negative, and the seller’s response is that he attempted to solve the complaint, either through e-mail (with a non-responsive/unreasonable buyer on the other end), or by replacement, etc. I tend to overlook the complaint. I understand some people are never pleased, and just jerks in general. I do feel for the seller in that aspect, though I don’t see it as justification to be dishonest.
I don’t think that how many views a page has had would be a good indicator of how many people will bid on an item. Right now I have an Ebay window open in which I am looking at Ren Faire stuff. I’m not going to bid on any of the items I’ve looked at, I just want to get some ideas for future garb. I’ve done the same thing with other types of items. Just looking to see what’s out there, no intention to buy whatsoever. I’m not even registered on Ebay!
I’ve seen this too! I was browsing ashtrays, and saw an ashtray described as “vintage” when I knew it wasn’t! I had owned the exact same one a few years ago. I’d bought it while in college at K-Mart for about a dollar, and here was someone describing it as “vintage”! Hah!
I just though of another etiquette issue:
What about those people who purposely bid a very low amount on Buy It Now auctions, so that the Buy It Now option disappears? I thiink I have seen it happen when someone does not want to pay the Buy It Now price, but wants to make sure that one else get it at that price either.
Bad etiquette?
Endemic,if they can get it cheaper than the Buy It Now price, more power to them. Remember, if they bid, they are agreeing to buy. If they wanted to pay that much money, they would have just used Buy It Now. That is why the seller has the option about how to set up his auction. If he isn’t willing to sell it for less money, he needs to raise his starting price.
Lok
Just thinking out loud here…
Imagine that Seller was willing to sell his object for $50, and set the Buy It Now price at that level. Now along comes Buyer A, who is only willing to pay $20 and wants to see if he can get it for that instead, by going through the regular auction process. So to make sure that no else comes in and grabs it at 50, he bids .01, and the BIN price disappears. At the same time, Buyer B was willing to bid, say, $100 for the piece, and would eagerly have grabbed it at the 50 BIN price, except that he saw the auction too late, after A had already bid .01.
So now the auction goes ahead, with A and B bidding at will. If the final price ends below $50, B might be happy, but Seller would be bugged not to have gotten the BIN price that B was originally willing to pay. And if it ends above $50, B would be bugged, because he could have had it for $50, but instead is paying more.
I know that this is assuming a bit of omniscience among the players involved, but at the bottom of the matter is the fact that the Seller wanted the auction to have a certain feature (BIN), and that Buyer A deliberately shanked the auction and took away that feature.
Just to go deeper into this point, the fact that A chose to take this defensive action shows that he suspected there might be others willing to pay the BIN price. If he believed this, then he knows that there is no chance that he would win the auction anyway, as B would be willing to bid more than A. So the only thing his shanking achieved was to make B possibly have to pay more than the BIN. Of course, B may also end up paying less than the BIN price, but the fact is, we was willing to take the auction at the BIN, and this option was selfishly taken away from him by A.
Wonder if I am just babbling ecojargon!
Regarding the BIN issue and other such things, I really wish that eBay had a lot more options available to sellers.
For BIN, what I want is to have the BIN price remain available until the bidding reaches a level near it, e.g., $45 on a $50 BIN item. It would also be nice if the seller were allowed the option of a late-bid time extended auction. Things like that. Just make them optional.
I tried the BIN on an item, but immediately someone put it a minimum bid and it went away. Hated that. BIN only seems to remain available if the min. bin is just below or the same as the BIN price. Since part of eBay’s fees are based on the min. bid, I suspect they like it that way to increase income, nevermind making more money for sellers (and thus for them!).
The seller sets the opening bid. If he set an opening bid of $0.01 with a $50 BIN, he got what he deserved. He needs to set the opening bid high enough to get what he wants out of it. I know some people will start auctions at $0.99 in order to minimize listing fees, but they need to know that it can backfire, they can end up selling for less than the item is worth.
Lok
I believe if you use BIN and a reserve, the BIN option is available until the reserve is met. Personally, I hate it when late bids extend the auction. This “feature” was why I stopped using ubid.
But reserve auctions are hated by a lot of buyers. And it really is unrelated to the reasons why I wish I could do more practical BIN sales.
Again, just make such things seller optional. If buyers end up not liking them, then sellers will adjust. Sheesh, we’ve had PayPal nearly rammed down out throats due to buyer demand. I see no reason why a buyer would dislike having the BIN option extended.
I figured this one out… I almost never bid early any more unless it’s something I’m only semi-interested in. Putting it on your watch-list and waiting for it to be the last hour or so works much better. Not only are there snipers, but an auction with a bid seems to attract more bids for some reason, even if there are similar unbid on things (what, people trust my opinion of sellers more than their own?). I just wait and hope the item goes unnoticed until it’s too late.
I had to bid early on something (Jasc’s paint shop pro power suite) this week because the auction ended while I was at work. Alas, it went for $5 more than my max bid. That’s ok, the same person put up a buy-now auction in between then and when I got home…for what I had bid on the other copy earlier. Needless to say, I bought it almost immediately after they put it up:D