Does anyone understand these? I have never participated because I don't understand it. Do you just place in your max bid, and they take the winner's bid at some live auction house, and stack it up against people who are there in person? In short, I should just put in my max amount, and hope that that beats out all other online bidders, and then hope that nobody will outbid that number in the actual auction house? Am I understanding it pretty closely?
From what I've seen, you have it nailed Rick. With the priority of live bidders, there's very little chance of winning on the internet unless you place a stupid dollar max. If I knew what my opponent's maximum bid would be at any live auction I've participated in, I would have won a lot more than I did!
There is something sinister about the ebay live auctions, in my opinion. I don't know what goes on behind the scenes, but the first time I saw one I assumed the auctioneer was using the ebay bidders to put a floor under the coin price that will be communicated to the live bidders.
Ebay live auctions serve one very good purpose - they announce that you should immediately go directly to the web site of the auction company holding this particular auction and place your bids there You can win by internet bidding in auctions - I have done it many times. But there are only two ways to do so. One is to do as satootoko suggested - bid crazy money. The other is to be very familiar with the current market price of a given coin, bid that amount, and be lucky at the same time.
I've participated in eBay's live auctions before and never found any good deals so far. From what I've been able to tell, there are some auctions run specifically through eBay only and there are some where you can go through eBay or go directly to the auction site running the auction. Once you configure your session to receive the information "realtime", then you sign up and get approved for the auction and after that just sit back and watch the "live" session go from one item to the next. If you're approved to just watch then you can't bid but if you get approved to bid you can then jump in if you want, but like I said earlier, things usually get out of hand on prices pretty quickly. Good luck.
what about heritage galleries, specifically? I've heard about them, but nothing specific - do their coins sold on ebay live carry some sort of geniune guarantee? I see some are sold 'as is', but it's not clear whether that's a condition/appearance disclaimer, or whether they will throw up their hands and say they knew nothing about the coin if it appears in my mailbox as fake.
Has anyone used teletrade.com for coin auctions? If so what were the results and would you try them again?
I have used Heritage and TeleTrade both - many times. I would not hesitate to buy coins from either of them. But I would not buy them via ebay live. The bidding in live auctions happens so fast the software can't keep up with it. You could be placing what you think is the next bid incremement and end up placing a bid 10 - 15 or 20 bid increments higher than you intended to bid.
