I’ve done a lot of online auctions, but I’m a newbie at ebay. What’s my best strategy to get the best buy prices? I put in a bunch of buys with auto bids at my max, but I feel this isn’t an optimal strategy. Also, I put in some bids with 3+ days left. On other sites, usually if I wait until 1-2 hours left, I can get the best prices.
What do you do?
I’ve had recent success finding items that ended on a holiday or over a holiday weekend. Apparently people take an eBay holiday too during that time and bidding was very light. Also look for misspelled terms in the title. I got an amazing deal on one product my searching for a misspelled name.
I use www.gixen.com.
I liked it so much I even went for the paid version which is unusual for me. I have managed to get some really good buys. But ymmv etc.
Bid late, bid once, bid your max. Pick an auction that ends at a time when bidding is likely to be sparse (I used to do well on auctions that ended on a weekday at the evening rush hour - presumably competitors weren’t either at home or work to be able to bid)
Though, now with smartphones, people can bid anywhere, anytime.
Put in a bid that’s the highest you’re willing to pay for the item, and then walk away until the auction is over. If you get what you want, great. If you don’t, then you didn’t overpay to get it.
First off I mentally set a max price that I want to pay. If you pay too much, it’s not ‘winning’.
I often put in a low bid early in the auction. Sometimes that’s all it takes. If I really want an item, I’ll be there at the very end to put in my max bid at the last second (or minute or hour).
My big secret: I really shouldn’t share this, but what the heck, we are all friends here. Search for items that are misspelled. For example my wife likes a certain pattern of Wedgwood China. You might be surprised how many people misspell it as Wedgewood. If you bid on an item that is misspelled, there’s less likelihood that many others will be bidding against you.
Actually the Wedgwood/Wedgewood example above isn’t the best anymore. EBay’s software does a pretty good job of fixing common misspellings or suggestion alternate spellings during searches. But it has worked well for me in the past.
Sniping. You use a computer program to bid within the last 10 seconds or so.
http://www.ebay.com/gds/Sniping-The-Best-kept-secret-on-Ebay-/10000000002571474/g.html
This used to work better before eBay started including misspelled listings alongside the correctly spelled ones using some kind of autocorrect system.
You need to do that late though - or else it will be nibbled by people with less self-control than you.
Use auto bid software on auctions that end in the middle of the night.
Look for misspelled items, not as any bidders will be there to cimpete
Wait until the market is flooded. I once wanted a zune, and soon a major retailer was selling hundreds of them at auction. Prices went down 20-30%.
The winning strategy is to use eBay as a store and not an auction house.
I have a 500+ 100% rating there and I gave up bidding on eBay items a couple of years ago. The bots, the gamers and the scammers just ruined the whole bidding process, and what they didn’t, eBay itself did. They never have implemented the one thing that would end all the bidding problems: every bid extends the bid time by one minute. Bots would be nerfed, snipers would be eliminated, and the whole practice of all serious bidding being done in the last 30 seconds would end.
Besides problems with bidding, eBay prices are often absurd - I have many times searched for something, found a range of prices-vs-seller quality, then gone and bought the item new, from a real vendor, for less. Bidding sometimes goes 25-50% past online retail for new items.
Unless an item is otherwise unavailable, I’d buy only BIN items that are competitively priced from well-rated shippers. I’ve bought a couple hundred in X-10 components in just the last few weeks, all new, at about 50% of other online retail. IMVHO, that’s all eBay is good for any more. Trying to battle the bidbots and idiots long ago stopped being worth the effort or potential costs.
But all of the above suggestions are good ones, if you want to try and beat the casino.
I’ve bidded a ton in the past 24 hours, and I have found a few things as well:
Definitely agree with others to decide what price is the maximum you consider the item to be worth before you bid anything. And do not go above this number. This is absolutely the most important piece of advice to follow.
This article discusses the psychology of auctions and it’s a really interesting read. About half of eBay auctions result in higher prices than the “Buy It Now” price. Interestingly, eBay themselves/their policies aren’t responsible for this and they actually make it easier for bidders to bid rationally:
It’s incredibly easy to get carried away in an auction because it really FEELS like a competition and we want to WIN in competitions. Winning an auction can change from, “I want to win this auction because I want/need this item” into, “I want to win this auction because that sonofabitch keeps outbidding me and I’ll be damned if that fucker bests me!”
So always decide the maximum you are willing to pay before you even click on the auction link and do not change it, no matter how tempting it seems.
I have two strategies- if an item has no bids, I bid what I want to pay then if I win I win, if not, Ok… In other words, Op, just do what you have been doing; “buys with auto bids at my max”.
If a item already has several bids, I’ll place a bid just over the current bid, then check back a little before it closes and then bid the max I want to pay.
Sniping doesn’t help the buyer as much as snipers think. You either pay what you want or you don’t. The only think sniping can help with is if you bid early on a hotly contested item, the other losing bidders could push the price up so that you no longer snag a lowball deal. This is very rare.
JBidwatcher. Free, very customizable, supported by author.
Sniping works because many people either don’t understand the automatic bidding system that eBay uses, or prefer not to use it. I’ve bid on auctions where one idiot keeps increasing his bid a couple of dollars at a time until he’s the high bidder. If you don’t bid until the last few seconds, this guy’s high bid is lower; therefore, your winning bid will be lower. Of course, this fails if others are sniping the same auction, but you usually* won’t do any worse than placing your bid early.
*There’s one exception: if you and another bidder both enter the same max bid, the earlier bidder gets preference. I usually get around this by adding a random number of cents to my max bid (although some others do the same).
Part of the psychology too seems to be “market value.” No matter how much research you do and how convinced you are that X is the maximum someone will pay, theres always that voice in the back of your head saying well, maybe what you thought was wrong. I’ve seen several items already where a new market price was defined by eBay.
Something else just came up, i won bids two days ago and only two out of 6 sellers sent me a tracking number. Is that normal?
What sort of postage did you agree to? Around here you have to pay extra for tracking
The best Ebay strategy is becoming that of the movie WarGames “the only winning move is not to play”.