I’ve been checking out a couple of items on ebay and I noticed that when I look at the bid history, there are often several back-to-back bids by the same person. These are not items that had reserves or anything. Does anyone know what that’s about?
Tery
I believe that’s when somebody tries to outbid someone who is using the proxy bidding and their limit is higher than the new bidder’s bid.
Item X has a start price at $10. I go in and place a bid for $10 and set my max proxy bid at $20. Then you come in and bid $15, but that’s not high enough to take it from me, so the bid history would look like this:
me (via proxy)
you
me (my opening bid)
I hope this helps…or even makes sense?
Eric
On 2002-09-13 02:01, vaporlock wrote:
Item X has a start price at $10. I go in and place a bid for $10 and set my max proxy bid at $20. Then you come in and bid $15, but that’s not high enough to take it from me, so the bid history would look like this:
me (via proxy)
you
me (my opening bid)I hope this helps…or even makes sense?
Eric
Yes, that makes sense. But what I see looks like:
charlie x
charlie x
charlie x
me (via proxy)
you
me (my opening bid)
With charlie x still holding the highest bid. It looks like charlie is outbidding himself, but that doesn’t make sense . . .
Tery
I’ve noticed this too and it appears to be a poor function of proxy bidding.
If something is worth $1,000 and the bids are around $100 why blast out 6-7 bids (thus bidding against oneself) driving the price up
way before the end of the auction?
Seems to defeat the idea of getting a bargan through well placed bids. Just because you’re willing to pay $1,000 for an item doesn’t mean you should throw away your money if no one else is bidding for it.
Might that be where there is a reserve and the person is trying to get to the reserve? I know I’ve done this before and it looked like I was bidding against myself but I was actually just trying to find the reserve amount. Thus far I haven’t had any problems with the proxy bidding system. Notice I said thus far.
Jim, many times this happens on bids without a reserve. Check this auction for example:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?MfcISAPICommand=ViewItem&item=901830118
http://cgi6.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewBids&item=901830118
one guy places 5 bids within 2 minutes… why?
“definitely kevin” was trying to outbid “toolman music” - Notice that Toolman’s bid for $250 was placed before Kevin’s five bids.
Kevin came along on the 26th at 20:15. Rikkend was the high bidder. Kevin bid but didn’t go high enough. He came back on the 28th, tried again with $225. That was the same amount Rikkend had bid, but since rikkend was first, he was still winning. So Kevin bid again a few hours later. By that time, Toolman music had come along and placed a much higher bid. Kevin bid several times in an effort to outbid him. His final bid of $250 was the same as toolman’s first bid, and again, since toolman was there first, his bid was considered to be winning. At that point Kevin gave up.
(Then jkellie came along and outbid Toolman, and he had to do the same thing that Kevin did.)
Ah, so the person placing the multiple back-go-back bids has just not checked the current high bid and is trying to beat it the hard way. Doesn’t make sense to me, given how ebay wroks, but who knows.
Tery
The bid values are not displayed until the auction ends. So he didn’t know that the high bid was $250 until he or someone else exceeds it.
Wow – I thought the line labeled “currently” was the current high bid. I guess I don’t really understand how e-bay works. That’s always the one I watch.
Tery
Sometimes I will place a straight bid on an item. Later on I realize that I’ll be gone when the auction ends and I decide to use proxy bidding. I’ve had two things happen when I do this:
I am the highest bidder and I up my proxy max - nothing happens except my max is raised
I am the highest bidder and I up my proxy max - it registers it as a bid and I show up as having just outbid myself (and I draw jeers from the crowd).
It’s happened to me both ways
On 2002-09-13 12:40, tkelly wrote:
Wow – I thought the line labeled “currently” was the current high bid. I guess I don’t really understand how e-bay works. That’s always the one I watch.Tery
Say you bid on something, opening bid, $5. The line reads “current high bid, $5”. Then I come along and bid $10. You only bid $5, so the new high bid is one incrememnt up, or $5.50. The line reads “current high bid, $5.50”. BUT my entire bid was $10, so if you want to outbid me you would have to bid higher than $10.
There’s no way for you to tell whether my maximum bid was $5.50, or $10, or $100. The only way for you to find out is to try to outbid me.
Well now… doesn’t that suck??
I wonder who thought that up 
.
But at least now I understand. Thanks for the explanation.
Tery