I didn’t think it was possible to withdraw a bid. The thing I was bidding for went up to £180 today. I’ve just checked it and it’s dropped to £155, which was the price it was at before it went to £180.
So did someone withdraw a bid?
A bid retration is the most likely cause of a price reduction. If the high bidder had a successful bid retration, his bid is technically gone, and the price would drop the next next lowest bid.
Unfortunately, an extremely common cause for bid retraction on eBay nowadays is someone “feeling out” the other bidders or trying to deduce the reserve price. This of course encourages sniping over proxy bidding early. I.e., it ticks a lot of people off.
Sellers have the option to cancel bids as well. If I don’t like your negative feedback, I can cancel your bid. If you click on the number of bids for the auction, you will get the bid history, which also lists any cancellations or retractions.
The bid history is confusing. My bid appears to be the most recent (even though I placed it over 24 hours ago) An e-bay username appears twice in a row under mine. One of his occurences has a time that is a few minutes after mine (even though mine is top of the list)
Yet the price stayed at £155 for a long time after my bid, and then went up to £180 on checking it today, and then back to £155 recently. But since my bid there is one ‘activity’ a few minutes after my bid, and nothing since.
My mistake. The retraction history is seperate from the bid history. There is one retraction dated well after mine with the reason “entered wrong amount”.
mystery solved. thanks for the replies.
Note that “entered wrong amount” means nothing. They are just characters on the page, it isn’t proof of anything.
Someone has figured out your current max bid. That’s not good for you. I would be extremely wary of participating further in this auction. Many times the bid retractor is a shill or another account of the seller. Find out if the retractor has done this before, if the seller has had this happen before, etc.
I’ve retracted three bids. All because the “.” on my keyboard suddenly went wonky and didn’t type. I realized a few minutes after placing the bids that I’d bid $350 on a used cd (and $200-something on 2 others) instead of $3.50. If it’s an error like that you’re allowed to retract* as long as * you then bid the correct amount immediately; if you don’t rebid, they have the right to let the bid you enter stand since you obviously lied about the reason for the retraction. If they really would do it, I’m not sure, but it is in the retraction rules.
FTR, I now have a new keyboard 
I had this happen to me just last week. I was selling a rare LP box set, and two days before the auction closed the bidding was up to $102.50. The next day, I was shocked to see that it had gone back down to $56.00. The only explanation for the retraction was “administrative cancellation.” I checked the bidder’s feedback page, and found that his eBay account had been cancelled that day, with nothing in his feedback to indicate that he had had any problems. I just checked again now, and he appears to have been reinstated, but someone has left him a negative feedback claiming that the bidder had threatened him on the phone!
It turned out all right for me, though, as the item did end up selling for well over $100, and the person whose account was cancelled wouldn’t have been the winner anyway.
Sorry to bump this but I the seller cancelled all bids in the end. wtf?? I was the winning bidder and I would have got the damn thing!
(it was a geforce FX 5900 Ultra graphics card)
As a buyer, I would never bid early on an auction for an item worth more than $20 under any circumstance whatsoever. You’ll lose more often, and you’ll put yourself at risk of being scammed.
Bidding early puts you at risk of being taken to the cleaners by shilling sellers. It also allows other bidders to do what’s happened here - find out your maximum bid before auction end by bidding high and retracting.
An early bid can allow sophisticated but legal bidders to look at your bid history to estimate your probable high bid. Bidding early can also attract auction stalkers who use you as a personal search engine - if they’re interested in the same thing as you, instead of going through all the trouble of searching, they just click on your bid history and bid on what you’ve bid on.
Always bid less than 5 minutes before the end of an auction. There are sites out there (esnipe.com is well-respected) where you can set up a bid to be placed at the end of an auction. Always bid your maximum (plus 15 cents or so to break a tie). If you lose, you know the winner paid more than you thought the item was worth; if you win, you know you can afford the item.
Bidding early on big-ticket items can cost you big.