Stupid eBay Tricks

[billroper]

I picked up a used ADAT XT-20 on eBay to use in the "portastudio" that I'm putting together for min0taur to use. I had another one go for a good bit more than I was willing to pay for this particular brand of obsolete -- but still useful! -- technology.

I was left to wonder at one of the features of eBay's bidding system. If you put in a maximum bid, the system will just bid you up to the minimum level necessary to get above the previous bid. This may be less than the reserve. It appears that you can have a maximum bid that's higher than the reserve, but fail to meet the reserve unless you either enter a larger bid by hand or another bidder pushes you over the reserve.

Am I misunderstanding the way this works, or is it just a bit nutso? It would seem like your bid should enter at the reserve price if your maximum bid is at or over the reserve. And if your maximum bid is less than the reserve, your bid should enter at the maximum.

Comments

Re: Reserves

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

I would say that disclosing the reserve price in the description defeats the purpose of having a reserve, except that to my way of thinking there IS no purpose to a reserve except to make the person offering the item look like a dork. Only a moron would make a bid they knew was lower than the reserve. And only a moron would bid on an item without reading the description closely enough to see that it announced the reserve price. But, I have to realize, a large part of the point of eBay is taking advantage of morons -- who wants to sell something for what it's worth, when you can get some dunce to pay a whole lot more?

Indeed ...

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

... in a live auction it is perfectly normal to not announce a reserve price until everyone has finished bidding and then say "the highest bid was 150 dollars, and has not reached the reserve".

The point is that if you say up front "I want 400 dollars for this" then possibly no one will bid. But if you start it at, say, 200 dollars, then someone may bid that, someone else come in at 210 and back to the first person at 220 etc. each one going just that 20 dollars more and getting invested in buying this item and beating the other person and suddenly they find they are at 500 dollars. This is pretty normal in auctions. And this is the reason for a hidden reserve, to get people bidding and wanting your item (and hoping they'll bid up to a price above your reserve).

It is also possible (on ebay) to lower your reserve and to offer to sell your item to the highest bidder even if it is below the reserve price.

But if you publish a reserve price, then I don't see why you don't set your starting price to that published reserve price. (Heh, just glanced down the desks and the chap two desks down is currently doing something on eBay!)