So I am bidding on a coin on eBay. Starting bid is $100. I bid that. I am the only bidder. Then the listing says that the reserve is not met. So I bid $125. Then the listing says I am the highest bidder, but the reserve is still not met. What if the reserve is $120 and I remain the only bidder? Will the reserve go unmet and the coin won't sell, even though I'm willing to go $125, because no one else is bidding against me for the reserve to be "triggered"? Does that make any sense? It seems an odd but plausible circumstance when there is only one bidder for a coin and the seller has set the minimum bid below the reserve. Does anyone have any insight here? And no, I'm not willing to go higher than $125 just to see if I could trigger the reserve. I think I could get the coin at another auction at that price or less. Any help here will be appreciated.
Strange! I don't know how this works but always find it odd when the opening bid is lower than the reserve price. Heritage does this frequently. Between their slabbing of everything and this ridiculous reserve pricing strategy, I often don't even browse HA's listings.
If you bid more than the reserve you get the item for the reserve price, assuming no one else bids more than you or more than the reserve. What is happening here is the reserve is higher than you have bid. John
Thanks. That's really good to know. It's unlikely that I will exceed 125. I do wonder about the philosophy of the reserve. For example, if I knew the reserve was 130, I'll probably go the extra five bucks. But then the companion logic obtains that if I am willing to go 130, why don't I just go ahead and bid that as my maximum bid? At some point the auction becomes less about economics and more about psychology. But maybe that's the way all auctions are. I wonder what the pro-reserve argument is and its seller strategy.
Not sure if it has changed, but the seller can sell you coin for the price you bid regardless of the reserve. He has a choice of removing the reserve before the auction ends, or offer it through the second chance option. Again this was before, I'm not sure if ebay has changed those options.
I suppose I should know this by now since I have sold a few items on eBay. But does the seller know my maximum bid? In other words, since I'm the only bidder, everyone besides me just sees a single bid of $100 on the listing. Does the seller know that I have bid up to 125? I can't imagine the seller would know that information, because it seems it would encourage shill bidding. If he knows someone has been up to 150, he could have his friend bid 145 just to trigger that maximum bid.
I would think if there was a reserve at auction then you would start low enough to generate interest and a bidding war.
By not selling a coin, the lister avoids paying eBay fees and gets an appraisal on what a coin might be worth. He can then sell it to a local customer saying that he had been offered $125 when actually he was offered $125 minus the considerable fees. Unless the item is a must have, I stopped bidding on reserve auctions some time ago. If eBay charged more to list coins that do not sell than they do for coins that do, we would have many fewer coins to see but many more that are really seriously for sale.
I think that would have to be the second-highest bid price -- your maximum bid should never be revealed to anyone else (including the seller), unless someone else bids it up to your maximum, or your maximum hits the reserve amount.
If you want to make the Seller crazy, and baffle all the Buyers, spend 5+ minutes raising your bid in $1 increments. The item eventually shows (say) 37 bids, but is only one or two bids above Start. Much of your competition gives up at that point, shaking their pointy little heads. It's all a game anyhow.
For Dougsmit, yes, that's eBay's "free appraisal service," and it's useful for really obscure items. Set the Reserve way high, and where people stop bidding, you might expect that number to be what the item's worth (and will bring without Reserve). Or a good point to set your Buy-It-Now dollar amount.
I agree that once might have worked but wonder now if too many people seriously interested in buying coins don't just write off these sales as games and choose not to play.
