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Old 11-08-2006, 08:52 AM   #1
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Why are people stupid? Ebay and Porsche Parts

ok so I'm looking for a certain Porsche item and I notice that this particular part is a no reserve auction for an item that is large and can't be shipped.
Meaning: the pool of bidders will be small
Days before the acution close I noticed a few bone heads are bidding up the price well up.

My question:

WHY DO PEOPLE DO THIS???!!!!

so you have a price in your head of what you are willing to pay. Why not just wait until the day of the auction and post your bid a few hours (TOPS) before the auction close.
What is the sense of bidding up the price DAYS[U] before the auction close?
Generally I mark an absolute highest price I'm willing to pay and if I'm sitting near a computer before the close I'll submit ONE bid with a few minutes to go. Sometimes I've have to drive off the highway and duck into a Kinkos to bid on the auction at one of their computers.

There must be a term for a bone head who bids up a price and doesn't end up bidding at all on the day of the auction. That stupidness only helps the seller in a no reserve auction. grrr....

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Old 11-08-2006, 09:07 AM   #2
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i know what you mean..i hate/love e-bay.

in an auction i'll say to myself with a few days left. alrite i'll bid 50 bucks for this item. then the few minutes left of the auction i see it go up and i say alrite i can go up a little thats fine. within seconds i see myself bidding and trying to outbid buyers and i end up spending 100 dollars when i told myself i was only going to spend 50 haha

maybe im not the only one?

maybe those guys have better self control then we do :P
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Old 11-08-2006, 09:11 AM   #3
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Not all the time it is a stupid bidder but "friends" of the seller making false bids to jack up the price.

Then again you do have the manic compulsive bidder who can not stand to be outbid no mater that the cost of the item is now $10.00 more than at the store
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Old 11-08-2006, 09:14 AM   #4
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Travis
Not all the time it is a stupid bidder but "friends" of the seller making false bids to jack up the price.

Then again you do have the manic compulsive bidder who can not stand to be outbid no mater that the cost of the item is now $10.00 more than at the store




thats me!
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Old 11-08-2006, 09:18 AM   #5
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with 20 bazillion people on ebay, bidding before the day of the auction in general seems dumb! Even if you bid let's say $50 for those clear tail lights a few days before the auction, what are the chances that your highest bid will stand for two days with thousands of other watching that same item?? SLIM...
Bidders are working against themselves and in favor of the seller and the Ebay(for their commission) for what reason? You aint winning anything until the day of the auction!

The only time I bid on an item before the auction close if it's a newly listed item with a good 'buy it now' price. Getting an email notice for this is often smart as you see it before most actually search for it.

I'm just completely dumbfounded why people bid on items with days to go. This
is essentialy eliminating the "good deal" area to a very small margin.

I should start my own ebay, one day auctions only, no reserve prices only and each bidder is allowed only one bid. Oh yeah and my website would actually have the outlandish idea of a 1-8000 customer service line.
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Last edited by Perfectlap; 11-08-2006 at 09:26 AM.
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Old 11-08-2006, 09:22 AM   #6
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Quote:
Originally Posted by 03b0x


thats me!
I started to reply before you had posted and got distracted, then after I submit I read your post and I thought "Oh ********************" I hope he did not think I took a jab at him.

But I think we all get caught up in the bidding in the final moment. I know I have paid more than market on a few items

-cheers
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Old 11-08-2006, 09:25 AM   #7
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"I'm just completely dumbfounded why people bid on items with days to go. This
is essentialy eliminating the "good deal" area to a very small margin."

Couldn't agree with you more. For high-demand items, I'm one of those people who comes out of nowhere in the last 30 seconds with a "blow-everyone-out-of-the-water" bid. I've found this to be the most effective strategy, as other bidders are lulled into a false sense of security and I rarely end up paying even close to my bid amount because no one else has time to react.
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Old 11-08-2006, 09:30 AM   #8
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well if people are putting their max proce, and if urs is higher....if they pist it days or hours before the end, and urs is higher, you will win either way.

but if it wasnt for people like that we wouldnt be able to win some parts/things the way we do.

but i do feel ur pain w the idiots
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Old 11-08-2006, 09:44 AM   #9
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The problem (and it might be the case with this item) is that oftentimes you have newly registered bidders that are on there solely to frustrate and try to screw the sellers. Ebay charges sellers a fee based on a percentage of the final value, and if someone with 0 or small feedback comes in with a massive bid and wins the item, the seller gets stuck with a big bill and nobody to actually pay for the item. Of course, the seller can file a dispute and have the fees refunded, but the process takes about 10 days, you then have to relist your item, and you may have lost that real buyer who moved on to an item that they did win. I've had all this happen to me on multiple occasions. My question is why people even waste time doing this crap - what do they get out of annyoning someone else?

I would have an ebay rule that bidders with feedback under, say 10, would not be able to bid in the last hour of an auction. Kind of an incentive for the sellers because they won't have to deal with this crap, and the bidders would need to "prove themselves" as responsible buyers on ebay.
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Old 11-08-2006, 09:51 AM   #10
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Don't forget tho, there's a whole 'nother side to ebay, the non-high-demand item side. The logic behind the non-high-demand item market is simple, pay only what you want to pay for any given item. Say I want to buy a certain book or game for $5. I go out once a week, hunt for any auctions of that item, and bid $5 on the best looking one. Come back a week later and see if I won, no? Ok, search again, repeat at will until I win it.

I think ebay was originally designed with this sort of system in mind. If the system was really built on actually bidding in the final hours/minutes, it would deny all the people with jobs and schedules that conflicted. So they made the automatic bidding process to allow people to put in their maximum right from the start and it would work it's way up to that by itself.

Bidding at the last second might be necessary for high demand items, but seems like the only people you are outbidding are people who don't properly use the system. People who instead of putting in their maximum willing pay price, will try to step it up a dollar at a time (and end up running out of time). When all the dust clears, it's just about putting in your max willing pay price and hoping for the best.

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Old 11-08-2006, 10:00 AM   #11
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I win most every auction I bid on by following these simple procedures...

1. I know the item's value in the minds of other eBay users by watching similar items come up for sale and go to other bidders.

2. I know what I can get the item new for online from another source and I make sure I'm not spending more than I should be.

3. I watch the item and set alarm clocks and ask my wife to remind me when the auction is about to end.

4. I insure I am logged in and ready to bid by placing a sample bid a minute or two before the auction closes, but I do not confirm the bid. This also helps me check the speed of my connection. If it's slow, I consider this and adjust the time I need to snipe it.

5. I wait until there is 15 seconds on the auction left and jam in my highest price plus a few extra dollars and cents to make sure my bid is an oddball one... ie, $546.69. This weeds out all the "add a buck and rebid" people.

6. I walk away and come back after its closed.

Now another thing I do is to look at the ending time of the auction. If its mid-day on a Tuesday, that item isn't going to go for much unless it's a business product. A personal item won't have a lot of bidders because they're not able to tear away from work to bid. I've gotten a lot of great stuff for really cheap in these auctions. Sunday evening auctions always make more than Tuesday afternoon auctions, that's for sure.

For example, I just bought a black carpet rear storage unit (the one you mount the speakers in) for $50 last week. The seller had no pix on the item, and quoted a hundred bucks for shipping. A quick email to him to ask for a reasonable price on shipping and confirmation that it was the plastic box and not the vinyl one and I was going for it. The auction closed at 3 pm on Thursday. They guy had no idea what it was worth and how to list stuff on eBay.
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Old 11-08-2006, 10:44 AM   #12
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Sometimes you just cant be at the computer when the auction is ending.
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Old 11-08-2006, 10:57 AM   #13
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that's true we aren't always around to bid but since this question is in regards to high demmand items (items with at least one daily bid) submitting a "leave and hope" type bid in one of these type auctions is really only helping to raise the final price.
I say make the time or don't bid. This practice would help all the buyers in the long run and thus attract more sellers.

p.s.
RN, you must be the guy who alway beats my $1.01 last ditch bids.
I'll have to change that to $1.99!
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Old 11-08-2006, 11:05 AM   #14
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There were some tail lights I was bidding on yesterday and it bacame a bad deal by the time the auction ended. I didnt win but did end up bidding 20 bucks more than I wanted to pay. I happened to be at my friends place picking up my car and he bid for me. At one point he said, just another 2 bucks we have time. I said no, it doesnt sound like much until 2 bucks turns into 60 and the lights arent a deal anymore. I wonder how many times we bid against each other on E-bay. My starter came today. Now that was a deal !
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Old 11-08-2006, 11:36 AM   #15
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Perfectlap I completely agree with you. Why anyone would bid just before the auction ends is beyond me. It usually is a newb or a friend of the seller trying to get the price up, though. Annoying to say the least.
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Old 11-08-2006, 12:01 PM   #16
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Chills, it makes all the common sense in the world to me to wait and bid at the last second. Why let the world know you want the high demand item by placing a bid early? It only drives up the price and creates a bidding frenzy.

Of course, you should feel free to maintain your opinion on this. It will always insure I win the bid on whatever we are both bidding on (unless you have put a top price in that is simply too far above the value of the item and I'm unwilling to pay for it).

The bottom line is that the snipers who bid in the last seconds win the auction 9 times out of 10. I want to be an auction winner, so I always snipe whenever possible.

The single exception to my strategy: The wifey wanted a set of four Christian Dior coffee mugs that are a rare piece of a discontinued pattern she is collecting (a very high demand item, believe it or not). It was her birthday in a couple of weeks and I was not going to lose this auction, so I jammed $500 into the eBay auction the morning it closed because I knew no other idiot would ever bid $125 per coffee mug. That was a huge risk on my part, but I knew there was a threshold somewhere for everyone and I would be well above it... the wife's birthday was worth it to me, even if I had to admit to her I paid 4x the retail price when they were sold new five or ten years ago and three times their book value.

The auction closed at $196.61 or something like that, which is $50 a mug (one would have thought these mugs were designed and sold by a Porsche parts counter, huh?)

Had I been there for the close of the auction, I'd have seen it going toward this amount and jammed $256.61 in there and gotten them for the same price, but not running the risk that someone with an attitude might keep jamming another price in there to see where my ceiling was.


Ohio, when I am not available at the last seconds of an auction's closing, I have a buddy or my wife snipe stuff for me at the last minute with my name and password. There are also sniping services on the internet, but you have to pay their fees in advance or pay a percentage of the item's final bid if you are the winner. I have also set an alarm clock for 3 am to snipe an auction. I'll wake up for 5 minutes to get a great deal on something for the Boxster!
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Old 11-08-2006, 12:19 PM   #17
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I've never had a coherent strategy for bidding on eBay. I've only bought 7 items in the entire time I've been registered, and three of those were for my daughter. I've always done much better buying and selling things on Craigslist. The lack of fees makes the transactions much more efficient, and I know I behave irrationally on eBay.

For example, I recently bid on a used Porsche hard top storage cover. The covers cost over $100 new and the "Buy It Now" price was $25 with $9 shipping. I bid $10 and the bid was good for two days without any counter bidders. The seller removed the "Buy It Now" and the bids went over $25 fairly quickly. It eventually sold for $51.

Now the irrational behavior kicked in when I saw the bids going over $40. I eventually bid $50 for the same item that I was unwilling to "Buy Now" for $25. Can anyone explain this behavior - I can't and it's my behavior.

On the other hand, I picked up a matching hard top for my car in almost perfect condition for $610. I guess it's better to be lucky than good.
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Old 11-08-2006, 12:37 PM   #18
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I too am a highly trained sniper. I'd say 95% of my bids come within the final 90 seconds or buy it now.

^ $610 for a hard top is a very good deal indeed.
Which incidentally was the item I was bidding on that sparked this thread/exasperation. I think I paid about $600 for my cheapo Miata hard top. The Spec Miata racing guys started buying them all up tripling the price from a couple hundred.

I buy just about everything there FIRST before caving in and paying retail. I recently bought three 1000 Thread count sheet sets for $140 delivered.
Had to do a little behind the scenese negotiation with 4 different sellers.
Lots of deals to be had for 'non-listed' items.
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Old 11-08-2006, 01:01 PM   #19
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"Now the irrational behavior kicked in when I saw the bids going over $40. I eventually bid $50 for the same item that I was unwilling to "Buy Now" for $25. Can anyone explain this behavior - I can't and it's my behavior."

I've been snared in this tangled web myself. So next time you're overpaying for an eBay purchase through no fault but your own, at least take solace in not being the only one.
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Old 11-08-2006, 01:20 PM   #20
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the key is to bid 7 seconds b4 t he auction ends

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