I think regular sellers who deal in vast quatities of low priced items are very unlikely to shill, for reasons noted by several posters. But among sellers of high priced items I think it’s pretty common. For example, cars (which is an area I’ve paid some attention to over the years). There are some sellers who like to attract attention by placing “NO RESERVE!!!” auctions with low starting bids, and they stand to lose big bucks if they don’t get bid up to an acceptable level (which happens pretty frequently in the case of cars). I believe most of these sellers use shills.
I myself once reported one auto seller who had several auctions of this sort, in all of which the lead bidder (this was before anonymous bids) was someone with 0 feedback. But even without such evidence, I’ll bet it’s more the rule than the exception in auctions of this sort.
I would never use an auction site that worked in that way. Full stop.
Most people who bid a lot will tell you that the only sensible way to bid is to decide exactly what is the most you are prepared to pay for an item and snipe at that price.
The use of sniping merely prevents bidding wars and bidding wars are just two or more people who are letting their emotions overcome a logical approach to purchasing. If you think the most an item is worth to you is £25 why on earth would it be worth £27 just because some else has bid £26?
It’s quite funny to watch a group of inexperienced (presumably) bidders bidding from 99p to, say, £10 over the course of an auction for something for which there is an established market at around, say, £25. The bidding works its way gradually up over six days and then, ten seconds before the end of the auction one or two realistic bids ramp it straight to a sensible price.
Because the origins of eBay were based on a place for average Joes to get rid of things that someone might want; not be a conduit for entreprenuers, which is what it has become.
Sorry if not being a professional bidder offends you. Seriously, I’d wager for most people, not every purchase is so cut and dry as you make it out to be. I did a totally unscientific poll and asked a handful of people on whether they set a price limit to the penny on purchases they might make. Not one said they did.
Because people are looking for bargains, not looking to buy things at your so-called established market value - who needs an auction site for that? Go to Amazon if you want to buy something at market value.
I’ve read that the car subset of eBay is rife with ripoffs, and it wouldn’t surprise me if there are a lot of dealers who try to use shills. I don’t think they would last long, since, as you’ve noted, it’s so easy to spot them. I sure wouldn’t buy a car off eBay.
This is what you have to figure out in your head before you place your bid; how much are you ***truly ***willing to pay? If the auction heats up, would you be willing to go higher? Then pick an amount, and stick with it. It’s not a better system or worse system, just different; you do your price determining up front instead in the heat of passion. It works out well for me, as I’m not likely to go wild and overspend. The people I know who hate being outbid at the last minute just use the Buy It Now feature, instead.
eBay can do whatever they like. However if they change the nature of what made them popular in the first place, (which is what happened) I’m going to exercise my right to complain and/or take my business elsewhere (which I have).
I preferred them when they were a virtual garage sale, with pricing by auction. Once the professional sellers got involved it invariably crept back into “market value” territory.
Not interested.
Problem is that once the Ebay option is available, it’s hard for the garage sale option to survive. Even if some non-professional seller has some junk they want to sell, why would they want to list it on some “virtual garage sale” type site if they could get close to “market value” on eBay?
I think eBay is great. But it’s better for some things than for others. For new products, it makes sense to check both eBay and one of the comparison shopping sites. For used products it generally can’t be beat, although there’s a lot of variation in pricing.
You can’t just assume that you’re getting a good deal just because you buy something on eBay. But eBay is an extremely useful option, on the whole.
Perhaps it’s just appealing to a different audience now.
BTW, when I talked about an established market, I wasn’t saying that things on Ebay necessarily sold for the price ‘on the market’ outside Ebay. I was referring to the fact that if similar items are sold on Ebay on a daily basis then there is a de facto market range (range is a better term than value) that that item tends to sell for on Ebay.
If there are five widgets sold every day at £10 it’s funny to see people making a whole lot of bids at the 99p to £3 range when it’s perfectly clear that there is a group of people who are willing to pay the ‘going rate’.
Do people really like the last-minute bidding on eBay (I assume that’s what sniping is)?
I agree, if there is a bid, the auction should extend by 15 or 30 minutes, until there are no more bids during that time-out. (or,say, 24 hours have passed since original ending if you also want a fixed end-time). That should nto be a problem - unles people automate their bid and timing; once the possibility of sniping is eliminated, then nobody will try to snipe. What replaces it remains to be seen, but an auction mimicking how they happen in real life - bids close when all but one bidder give up - is probably a more satisfactory option for most users.
There are websites, not affiliated with ebay that you can sign up for that will automatically watch an auction for you, and not place a bid until either someone else bids or the auction is about to end. They will automatically do the same thing that ebay’s maximum bid system does. If I recall, ebay policy is to ban those IP addresses when it catches them, but it’s easy to set up another one, so they can’t get rid of them completely. I imagine some sellers may use those as “automated shills” at times, but as a previous poster said, that will get the person who set it up banned eventually. In the meantime, just go on to a different auction for a similar item. You’ll never beat those things, unless the person who set it up didn’t put their max bid higher than you are willing to pay.
ETA: Most of the ones I’ve seen try to charge you for the privelege of using them, but they don’t do anything you can’t do just as well by using ebay’s max bid system. They are for suckers.
IF they ban snipers, that must mean they don’t want them. If it is unethical to watch a video for free because the owner wants you to pay for it, then it is unethical to use a system the owners don’t want you to use.
Anyways, I did try out a sniper program a bunch of times–before I knew that eBay didn’t like them (and I’m still not convinced since they use a system that allows it). Not once did it help me in any way. If my price was low enough that I was going to be outbid, then I was still outbid by another sniper, if not by the proxy bid system.
And, yes, eBay is most likely losing money for not keeping the bid wars going as long as possible. Nobody is able to make the same decisions in the moment that they would make if they sat down and thought about it. But, honestly, that makes eBay seem a lot more ethical to me. No stupid appeal to emotions.
Note that a seller has to pay the full fees if he bids on his own crap and wins the auction. Nor can he tell what your maximum bid is without “nibbling”.
I have seen very little shilling on eBay.
What I see more often is auctions where the seller really doesn’t what to sell the item, he’s placed a lowball opening price and a absurd Reserve price. I generally avoid Reserve auctions, they are a waste of time in most cases.
Dudes, can you please move the debate about sniping to another thread, perhaps IMHO? I’ll even join in.
That’s the main point of shilling. So that guys like you shouldn’t avoid the auction. It’s like having a secret reserve.
Though it also helps in that people are influenced by other people, and the idea that another bidder thinks this is a great item will influence people.
I am personally familiar with a case of shilling, which was done for such reasons. (In that case, someone I know was conducting one of these “weird” auctions, and he thought some action at the outset would get things rolling.)
The auction still has to end at a particular time; you’ve just arbitrarily extended that time by 30 minutes. I don’t see the advantage, other than to favor those who like to sit at their computer all day and pick at their bids over and over. It’s basically making it so that whoever has the most free time on his hands gets the last bid. The way I see it, if you wanted the item, you should have entered the highest proxy bid you’re willing to pay. If you get beat, then the other person obviously wanted the item more than you.
EBay can never be (and shouldn’t be) like a “real life auction”, because the bidders are not all present at the same time and place. The proxy bid system lets anyone participate, not just those who happen to be sitting at their computers when the auction is ending.
I believe that shill bidding is fairly rampant on eBay. Back when you could actually see who was bidding, it was possible to do a little detective work and figure out when it was being done. For example, you would often see a member who only bid on a particular other member’s auctions, which in most cases made it pretty obvious it was a shill. Of course, I have no doubt than many others were doing it in a more subtle way that made it more difficult to discover.
Now that eBay has inexplicably changed the website to make the bidders’ identities anonymous, it is difficult if not impossible to discover when shills are being used. Has the practice stopped now that bidder identities are anonymous? I doubt it. Since it’s now easier to get away with it, I would imagine the practice has increased if anything. I am quite convinced that eBay is only concerned with making money. Having shill bidders generates more income for eBay, whereas investigating shill bidders and enforcing the policy doesn’t really make money for them. So I seriously doubt they are expending any serious effort to do so.
Having said that, I don’t believe the fact that an item went “close to the BIN price”, or “someone bid right after you did” is proof of any malfeasance.
It’s not inexplicable at all. It’s to cut down on fraud.
Before the bidders were anonymous, I would routinely get emails after I lost auctions, claiming that the winning bidder had been disqualified and I was now the winner etc. I imagine any number of people must have fallen to these types of scams, or they would have stopped. Now that bidders are anonymous, this has ceased.
Another high priority for Ebay, and undoubtedly a part of their anonymizing bidders, is preventing off-site transactions. Even if the guy emailing you after the Ebay sale is legit, if he directs you to his own site rather than the 'bay, Ebay is out 14% of your sale price.
I have an account that I use exclusively to purchase items for resale. Without private auctions and a private profile, use of this account can give my competition valuable business intelligence.
I know, because I’ve monitored others in my market niche, and made good money from what I learned due to their bidding behavior.
One thing no one has mentioned, that makes me skeptical that shill bidding is widespread, is the possibility of the shill winning the auction. If this happens, the seller is stuck having to pay the ebay fees for both the listing and the final value (around 10% of the selling price), and now he has to list the item again. If the shill account is bidding close to the buy-it-now price it seems that this should happen frequently.
