With Ebay’s proxy bidding system, you can enter whatever number you want into the system as your potential bid.
The system will automatically bid just what is required to reach top bid up until your maximum potential bid.
Now, here’s a dumb catch: Say something is going for $40, and you decide you’re willing to bid $70. You make a potential/high bid of $70, but the actual bid/auction is at, say, $45, with you as the high bidder.
So now you’re winning with a bid of $45, but you still have a potential bid of $70. You change your mind. Maybe you’re not willing to pay $70 after all. Or maybe you find a better item and want to be outbid.
So, since you didn’t actually bid 70, you only said you’d potentially go as high as $70, you should be able to alter that potential bid, right? Simple.
Well, no, of course not. You can’t change that potential bid. It’s as rock solid as a real bid. For no good reason as far as I can tell. I mean it’s not as if I were retracting my real bid - I’m just retracting what I might bid in the future.
I have changed my mind on bids a couple of times. You can retract your whole bid then start over. Your bid is not set in stone till the time expires. Email the seller and tell them to remove your bid. Per Ebay rules, they are obligated to cancel any bids per the buyers request.
As an eBay seller, I can assure you that while I’m under no obligation to cancel bids from a potential buyer who asks me to or work with buyers in other ways, it’s really in my best interests to do it because chances are that buyer will end up not paying if they DO win the auction for more than they want to spend. And if I don’t cancel their bid, chances are good that they’ll find something to complain about and leave me negative feedback. Like a lot of sellers, I don’t ever leave negative feedback, no matter how justified, because I don’t want to receive retaliatory negative feedback; I find it serves my purposes better to maintain 100% positive feedback. Sometimes sellers prefer to work with buyers for other reasons than blindly following the rules, in other words. (I’ll even let you return items because you find you “don’t absolutely love them,” although you do have to pay postage!) I’ve had the buyer of a really nastily defective item actually leave me positive feedback for the way I handled the transaction, so clearly my policy is working well.
All this being said, when I bid myself, I use Hammersnipe so that I don’t have an irrevocable bid to worry that I shouldn’t have made for several days. But if a buyer isn’t happy for any reason, it’s in everybody’s best interests to just find a way to end the thing before it gets out of hand.
Well, I wouldn’t necesarily want to retract my bid. I understand the rules governing bid retraction.
But in this case, I wouldn’t be retracting my bid at all - I would just be lowering the limit I set for the proxy bid system to bid for me. I’d be changing the maximum value for future bids that I haven’t made any garuntees about to anyone. So the rule about that is totally arbitrary and nonsensical as far as I can see.
Yeah, that proxy bid thing can be a bitch. I had a bid in for about $33 and was winning up until about an hour left on one item. Next thing I know I’m outbid. The guy proxy bid over $100, and I know that because I bid him up to that in $5 increments.
I really didn’t want it THAT bad, I just felt vengeful. So I made him pay a metric assload more than he had to. Cool? No. But satisfying.
