Not waiting until the last minute is easy and yes you do name your price. The only problem I see with it is you are less likely to get the good deals. example= You max bid 60$ right away another person's max bid is 55$. He bids like 30$ and waits until the auction is almost over and bids 55$ and is outbid. He decides he really likes the coin and since someone else is interested in it too it is even more appealing. He decides he can go a little higher and bids a little bit more than 60$. Since you are not around to reoutbid him, he wins the item for like 61$ or something. Had you bid 60$ in the last seconds of the auction maybe you win the coin for 56$. Also you might catch someone off guard and get it for much cheaper because they don't bid higher than there initial bid which may not be their max bid. It is pretty rare to get those deals especially from top rated sellers who have a lot of loyal customers, but saving a little money on multiple purchases or a lot on the bigger ones can really add up. Overall, it just masks your interest in the item and that is key unless you are willing to pay top dollar for an item. I know how it feels though. If I miss an item someone else seems to get it w/ little to no competition and when I'm really interested in an item I often get outbid by one individual. Sometimes you get lucky though and it's a good thing I don't win every auction I bid on.
It's a common tactic. I always wait until the last 10 seconds to bid, because I firmly believe that any time you make an early bid, you draw attention to the item. Also, it's a good way to bid yourself up, if you get into a bidding war with someone else who wouldn't have otherwise payed that much, but they got into the heat of the moment. I'd bet the other bidder was just waiting until the last minute to bid, to avoid drawing attention and bidding the item up, then just happened to have a higher max bid than you. It happens.
Let's try this once more. I bid my maximum early. "Maximum" means I am not going any higher. "Early" means sometime before the last hour, generally much earlier. Bidding my max means that I cannot be sniped. Sniping means placing a last second bid in order to prevent others from outbidding you. Being sniped implies that I intended to bid higher if necessary. But bidding my max means that I have no intention of bidding higher. Therefore it doesn't matter when a higher bid than mine is made: -- an earlier bid that was higher than mine. -- a higher bid made after mine, doesn't matter whether it's hours or seconds before the item closes. I have NOT been prevented from bidding higher since I had no intention to in the first place. But, of course I can be outbid. But that can happen at ANY time. And no matter when the bid is made that beats me, IMO that person paid too much. Since I started several days earlier I've had time to consider my bid within the best of my abilities. As for the "drawing attention" factor. I would love to think that a bid by me caused others to become interested who would otherwise have passed on an item. I guarantee that someone would be giving me a LOT more credit than I'm due. Of course with the x***x bidders' ID's now no one would know who's doing the bidding (except the seller). And if you base your interest on the fact that someone else is bidding on an item you are letting them do the thinking for you. Considering the number of items that are ridiculously overbid you would in real danger of overpaying. BOTTOM LINE: Some people snipe. Some don't.
As the original person beginning this thread, it is interesting to see the various ways people bid on EBay. My attitude now is that the game playing on EBay auctions is a little hard to take. When I can, I use BIN, make an offer, or if I must, bid my max early. Unfortunately, the coins worth buying are on EBay auctions. The ones in BIN have problems or are top items. As to the original issue, I can see now how someone can snipe me at the last second. It was just strange the same person did the same thing for both medals. Yes I was frustrated and angry, and this thread was begun with that emotion.
My only caution with BIN is do some homework first. I have found BIN's on ebay higher than dealers will charge - so check dealers and other auction houses. I have also found some quality coins on ebay cheaper than dealers. I have seen some assume EBAY is always cheaper and they avoid dealers.
So in this particular case you had NOT bid your max. That may not have made a difference because you don't know how big the sniper's bids were. If you had bid your max you still might have been outbid, and you would still probably have felt "frustrated and angry", but probably not to the same degree. I try to eliminate stress. I bid my max and I win or lose. Next coin, please.
Exactly the way I do it Dave. I bid what I'm willing to pay and if someone is willing to pay more then I just move on. Bruce
Okay, okay, you're a perfectly rational bidder, you always bid your max, and therefore you have no stress and no regrets. Thing is, you're bidding against others who aren't necessarily perfectly rational. They may be more likely to check out an auction that already has one or more bids -- if others have bid on it, it may seem more likely to be legitimate, or less likely to have an unreasonable opening bid. They may be influenced by the current bid price. "I wasn't sure this lot is a good deal, but if others have already bid it up, they must think so. Maybe they see something I'm missing." Or, they may simply not have a good idea of what they should expect to pay. "I don't really know what grade this coin is, but it looks nice. Others have already bid it up to ($5/$50/$500), I guess I can go ($6/$60/$600)." It doesn't matter that you're a perfectly rational bidder. If your competitors aren't, your early bids can motivate them to bid higher. As a result, you're more likely to lose the auction (if they exceed your max), or pay a higher price for the item (if you don't). I too bid my max, and I win or lose. But I almost always do it at the last minute, and this is why.
What he is trying to say is that "rational" bidders know what THEY want to bid. It is immaterial what others think (or do not think) of the item. Then you win some and lose some. End of story. That is exactly how I do it except I now use a sniping program.
The frustrating thing for me is that with medals the maximum amount is subjective, and the amount it has sold for before can be hard to find. A coin has a definite value and even a beginner like myself can roughly grade a coin or else buy certified coins. If you lose a coin you can normally find the same thing the next week not so with medals. BTW I just bought the same medal I lost on Sunday for much less. The major difference is the lack of the separate outside sun like holder. The one that hurt,which I lost, was a beautiful medal of Mount Vernon. Just hurts to lose that one.
This is exactly right. Many people on ebay are irrational. If you bid $150 on an item that should only be $125, and it sits there long enough, somebody out there is going to think about it for hours and rationalize it in their own mind to bid $155. If you don't give them a max bid to sit there and think about, then it keeps the price lower and avoids that situation. It seems as though people will always talk themselves into bidding higher just to win if they have time to think about it. That's why people use the sniping programs. You can set up a sniping program to simultaneously place your max bid on 10 auctions at the exact same time, 1 second before they end. This is nothing new. It's been going on for years. The worst I've ever been outbid was by one cent and it was completely coincidental. If the winning bid is $1 over your max bid, that's just the bid increment. They could have bid a million dollars on it and the new bid is only going to go the min. bid increment over your high bid.
If you think it went for less than you would have paid, you should have bid more. I will never cost you more than what you are willing to pay if that is what you bid. If you just bid to beat the current bid, you will probably lose nearly every one.
You don't even have to bid by the official bid increment on eBay: Recently, I outbid someone at the last second by $0.01. The coin at the time was at around $7, I put in a $15 bid at the end , and their max bid was $14.99 (which I only saw at the end of the auction), and I won.
That is just it I did bid my max. My bid was the Only bid and a full fifty dollars more than the starting bid price. The other person came in and bid more than my max at the last second. If I had thought anyone else was interested, I may have bid more than my max to make sure I won the auction.
haha...this is precisely why I bid a couple of cents over an even dollar amount. Every now and then you win one by those couple of cents
If you "may have bid more than your max bid, then your max bid wasn't your max bid. The bid your max bid and forget it win or lose does mean that you can't be made to pay more than you think the coin is worth. And the amout of wins will be the same whether or not you place that max bid early or as a last second snipe. (Actually placing them early does give you a very slight chance at more wins.) But overall you will also most likely pay more money for your wins with early bidding than with last moment snipes using the same max bids. This is because you will often be bidding against less sophisticated ebay bidders who try and win by just bidding against the current high bid until they have the high bid and then stopping. For example say there is a coin starting at $40 that you think is worth $100 and someone else is worth $90. And for simplicity sake let's assume you are the only two bidders and you are just going to bid your max and forget it. In this case it doesn't matter if you bid early or late or if the other guy bids early or late you are going to win the auction. If the other guy also bids his max it doesn't matter when he bids you will win for $92.50. If he bids just enough to beat the current high bid and you bid early you win at $92.50 because he has the time to keep trying to beat your bid until it passes his max bid. If he bids just enough to beat the high bid and you bid your max at the last moment you win at $41 or $42. depending on whether or not he bids before or after you. This is because he doesn't have the chance to bid again Now suppose the other guy was willing to bid $125. If you both do max bids you lose the auction and it doesn't matter who bids first or when. If you bid your max early and he just bids to beat the current high bid, if he bids early you lose the auction because he keeps getting out bid by your max bad and so keeps increasing until he beats it. If he bids late you may or may not lose depending on whether or not he has enough time to keep bidding until he tops your max bid. On the other hand if you bid in the last few second you will win the auction because he doesn't have enough time to keep entering a higher bid. So you win at a low level even though he was willing to go 25% higher than you were. To summarize a max bid placed in the last few seconds always wins except against a max bid higher than your own. A max bid placed in the last few seconds will win against an incremental bidder at a price often well below your max bid even if the other bidder is willing to go much higher than you are. A max bid placed early always loses to a max bid higher than yours no matter when it is placed. A max bid placed early always beats an incremental bidder whose maximum is less than yours at one increment over his maximum. A max bid placed early always loses to an incremental bidder whose maximum is greater than yours. From these five possibilities it should be clear that your best chance of winning, and winning for less than your maximum bid is to place that maximum bid in the last few seconds. In other words by sniping.
Always bid at the end. thats what I do and I'm a seller and buyer on ebay. Also, I have sniped people at the end. There was a mourning cross I wanted so I outbid everyone by 150.00. I really wanted the cross. Normally people max out at 20 bucks. I was also sniped on another mourning cross auction. They outbid me by a buck. Yeah, I agree with the previous post and other posters. Sniping isn't nice. But the days of old when people were nice and bid throughout the 7 day auction are over. As a seller I see more action in the last 10 minutes than the last 6 days.
If you would have bid more that what you bid was not your maximum bid. If you had bid your max, your feeling would have been that he paid too much (or at the very least, he paid more than I was willing to pay).
