E-Bay question

I was looking at the bid history on an item I was interested in on e-bay and didn't understand why the final amount was so high. I thought that if you bid a high amount on an item e-bay was supposed to automatically raise the bid for you in small increments as other people bid till you reached your maximum bid. On the bid history on this Item though it looks like e-bay raised the bid on the same bidder to his max. Am I reading this wrong or did td1racer get took for almost a hundred bucks.

Bidding History (Highest bids first) User ID Bid Amount Date of Bid td1racer(58) $150.00 Sep-23-02 14:47:21 PDT td1racer(58) $150.00 Sep-23-02 07:42:06 PDT td1racer(58) $100.00 Sep-22-02 08:04:49 PDT crazy4windmills(36) $50.99 Sep-20-02 15:26:49 PDT arney7(14) $50.00 Sep-22-02 06:56:04 PDT crazy4windmills(36) $45.99 Sep-20-02 15:25:27 PDT crazy4windmills(36) $35.00 Sep-19-02 18:48:08 PDT

Here is how I see the bidding history. He was trying to locate the reserve....He finally located it at $150. He then put an additional bid in to bump his proxy up past the current bid of the reserve. This would protect him if someone bumped the price seeing that the reserve was reached.

I think I have this one. Let's say you have the high bid at 50$ with a max of 100$. You see the 50$ bid 'cause so far you have the high bid. Then some guy comes in with a bid of 50.50 and has a max of 99.50. You will not see the bid go to 51$, it's to fast. The computer will automatically take you both up until your bid is higher or you have reached the max. If the other bidder's max was 75$, then the bid would have stopped at 75.50 in your favor without reaching your max. David.

I have to agree Arney! That is quite a jump from $59.00 to $100.00 then to $150.00(same bidder) He was the last bidder after the $59.00, should have only increased a couple dollars(I thought anyways) not to his maximum bid?

Anybody else see something here we don`t see??

oldenginejim

Arney,

It's kind of tricky looking at bids for an auction on ebay. Say BidderA puts a max bid of $100 on an item and it's currently at $50. If BidderB comes in and bids a max of $75, it won't actually show BidderB's bid on the bid sheet. Intead, it will show BidderA as bidding $76 and remaining as the high bidder. So, while BidderB did bid, ebay doesn't show their actual bid as they were never really in the game. Instead, it just shows the list of bidders who at one time or another were actually high bidder on the item. But, you can still tell someone bid it up in the background. While that guy/gal won the item for $150, it's very possible his maximum bid was much higher.

If you think about it, it makes sense to exclude the other bids as ebay does automatically bid for people in $1.00 or so incraments. So, if BidderB bid $75, it would list about 25 different bids between BidderA and Bidder B up to $76, going (BidderB: $51, BidderA: $52, BidderB: $53, BidderA: $54) and so on until it ended with BidderA at $76. So, thanks to Ebay for saving us from having to read through a bid list like this.

Well, I've rambled on and probably confused you more than helping you, but hopefully you can find some sense in there!

-Jeff

I got it now. Didn`t see the "reserve met" on the actual auction page. Thanks Tom and David and Steve!

oldenginejim

I think I understand this a little better now but I didn't realize that you could raise your own bid like that trying to find the reserve. I thought the computer would recognize your bid name and raise the proxy but keep the high bid just higher than the next bidder even if the reserve wasn't met.

you cant actually bid against yourself but if you raise your max bid several times after all is over if you were out bid or almost outbid it will show each raise as an indevidual bid. Then there are the people who dont understand proxy bidding who will raise their own bid the min. each time until they are high bidder. I gues what I am trying to say is things arnt always as they look. The ones I like are the ones that go for some outragous price and then show up on ebay again by the same seller. When you check for neg feedback on the buyer there is non, hmmm. Somebody is bidding up their own item and got stuck with it.

If you see that happen turn it in to ebay. No, they usually won't tell you they did something about it, you just get a noncomittal "thank you for bringing this to our attention, blah blah blah" respnse. BUT I did hear of one case (a 12" scale (full sized) trolley body, so it was rather obvious) where the people involved not only got their privieleges revoked, but were allegedly dragged into their local court for fraud.

I was referring to "shill bidding". In the auction mentioned the "winner" the first time was the back bidder the second time, and as I heard it, either an employee or relative of the seller) And no, I never heard what happened in the courts.