eBay madness

It is but ebays all about cheating

Everyone else is doing it, and I don't see any mention of it in ebay's T&C...

Weirdly I have snagged items which I would have thought very desirable by just putting down the starting bid with 5mins to go. Apparently nobody else wanted a minty black ME with 50/1.7 for £20!

...and I was panicking for the next couple of days thinking I must have bought a duff! Turned out to be pristine and a lens I have had excellent results from - it makes a superb walk-around.

Does automated sniping make any difference these days?


You can manual bid with 2 seconds to spare. There's no time for someone to increase their bid. If someone snipes higher bid than you they're going to bag it whether they put the bid in at 3 seconds or 0.000001 seconds to go.

The best thing about sniping is you set your bid and 'forget'. If you are lucky (perhaps the sale ends late at night or Sunday morning etc), you will find you may pay a lot less than the maximum bid you entered. Of course you could do this manually but you'd actually have to be sitting there in front of the PC. And you'd have to rely on your own discipline not to try a higher bid at the last minute, if you're not successful...

Most of the good used Pentax equipment sold in South Africa is listed on Bid or Bye, they have a horrible option which allows the seller to set up the auction so that the bid time is extended by one minute every time there is a last minute bid. That is when the prices go mad and sniping does not work.I bid my maximum price and walk away.



Greg

Mark's method is probably the shady ebay sellers friend!
It saves them from having to put on "Shill Bids" and risk prosecution link All the driving up of prices by people "Nibbling" is done for the dodgy seller by someone putting a big bid on early in the auction link

Sorry Mark, but you could have probably saved 20-33% by sniping You can find sniping sites that only charge about 13p if you win nothing if you lose.... Quids in!...

It's completely bonkers how buyers will find some silly feature that's on say one lens and missing on another so they start rumors that it must be magical and the one to go for i.e. Silvernosed (early models) Olympus lenses or that a lens was in production for a short period as stop-gap model such as the Pentax 'K' lenses.

This Silvernosed Oly 24mm link sold for TWICE the price of a non-silvernosed (probably better) model link

Flickr site about the differences link

Or just use Vrane.

It lets you snipe one auction at a time for free..

I've lost a few auctions recently to snipers, but I wasn't willing to pay £65 for an old camera selling as spares or repair. If it was listed as mint/working it would still be a wrench to part with that sort of cash just on a photo for condition!

Glad I don’t know how to use ebay.
Looks like ignorance, really is bliss in this case.



Take care.

Chris R.

Mark's approach is nonsense.

It ignores human frailty. If somebody has his eye on something, and he is, pro tem, the winning bidder, he will start to believe it is his.

Then along comes Mark, and places a higher bid. Buyer one, outraged, will then bid again (and he will bid MORE than he originally decided the item was worth), and Mark will lose the item.

If Mark waited until 5 seconds before the end of the auction, his bid would win because the original buyer would not have time to bid again.

G

The WHOLE point of sniping is that weak-minded buyers don't get an opportunity to bid again.

In fact, it's good for them too. It stops them from bidding too much in the heat of the moment.

G

I have always done as Mark does. For example, a filter that sells for £50 comes up, the seller is reliable and says it is as brand new with postage of £3.

The most I'd pay is £35 quid, less postage, my maximum bid therefore is £32. I put that bid in anytime since if someone else bids more I'll lose it anyway but also if the highest last minute bid is £28.50, I'll get it for £29.

I just bid to buy. My wife, however enjoys the bidding, eBay or proper auction and that's how people get to pay too much sometimes.

Incidentally, I've sold two Pentax lenses on eBay and in both cases got more than I paid for them because it was just after the period when Pentax went silly with their prices.

There was a perfect example on ebay of what nonsense this method of bidding is link

A 28mm Pentax M lens with what the seller described as:
"HEAVY FUNGUS INSIDE LENS" It's worth £10 - £15 at the most but sold for an unbelieveable £41 + £3 postage all because of idiotic or shill bidding The last bid was so idiotic that no one else bid again and that bid stood for 3 days.

If you click on (6 bids) then "show automatic bids" you will see that within the 1st 24 hours someone put on a massive bid.
A day later a 2nd bidder came along and bid £5 not enough so he tried £8 still not enough, but he must have thought that was all the lens was worth so he pulled out. 3 days later he'd had 2nd thoughts and came back with a bid of £11.50.... still not enough, but he had the sense to leave it at that. Price now £12.

2 days later another bidder comes along and thinks I'll put on my max. bid and win this lens.... so he puts on £30..... He's flabber is totaly ghasted the price jumps to £31 and he isn't the high bidder.... not to be outdone he immediately bids £40 and the lens jumps to £41 and he isn't the high bidder He sensibly pulls out... the lens is full of fungus after all 3 days left and no further bids.

If the original bidder had put a snipe on he would have got the lens for £31 and that's with a 2nd foolish bidder knocking the price up from £12 to £31 in the space of one bid

The price was driven so high by TWO people putting on their highest prices.

I hope this doesn't offend Mark who's one of the nicest people on this forum Just trying to educate people towards a cheaper way of buying on ebay.

Edit: Just had a thought... the way some people have been pushing up the price of these lenses to way more than they are worth on here.... the buyer is probably in our midst

I have witnessed false bids being placed for items and it is quite possible that this happened on the lenses mentioned here (the fungus one sounds fishy to me).

Someone at my work was selling something a few years ago- he rang up his mate and asked him to put a bid on it. The genuine buyers "took the bait" and a bidding war ensued- the genuine buyer paid quite a lot of money for the item in the end. Plain wrong.

Against Ebay rules for sure but difficult to police and why I dont like ebay myself. I have purchased BIN items before but would only buy in an auction if very cheap which is rare.

I find it staggering that people buy high value items this way.