It looks like an artifact of competing sniping programs to me. Many of the bids were under 3 seconds apart and the bid increment changed at the appropriate threshholds. I've seen similar bid histories when I've won an auction using a snipe. On one auction, I placed one snipe bid and won, but the bid history included the 19 increments necessary to make me the highest bidder. Using that line of thinking, here's a possible timeline of bids: Item is at $32 when I***1 places bid with max value of $620. Unknown to him, j***s has a snipe/bid with a max value of $605. This drives the bid, via the appropriate increments, to $620 in a matter of under 4 minutes and j***s receives a notification that he is outbid. 45 minutes later, j***s ups his max bid to $1200. Meanwhile, a***a was using a different snipe program with a max bid of $1050 and his bid drove j***s up to his max of $1200. Later, e***0 manually enters his bid with a max of over $1225. Or maybe not...
I bid on an item a few days ago that was at 99 cents with 39 bids on it (they were all the same bidder. I bid a little higher just to see what would happen. He outbid me and got the coin for like $1.50. I couldn't figure out what the deal was there either.
agreed, I did about 5 bids the other night, but, just because I couldn't justify higher numbers. I wound up losing.
Well, the said coin is back on Ebay now. Winning bidder last time didnt pay, so ill have to try it again. There should be stiffer penalties for not paying. imo
Might be important to specify, that the guy who bid 95 times, was not the guy who didn't pay in the end.
Besides the annoying factor, is there any reason not to do it this way? As I understand it, if someone makes a hidden bid you will not know how much it is, just that yours is not high enough. Is the above correct? And if it is, what this guy did if he wants to be high with the lowest amount possible, doesn't this behavior make total sense? My 2nd paragraph must be wrong somewhere, or else this would go on all the time.
clearly, there should be SOME penalty. Last year I sold a piece that clearly stated payment within 72 hours, or some such. Winning bidder asked how long he had to pay (low value item, below $100) I told him 72 hours. He never paid, I opened case and eBay just refunded my fees, no penalty to the buyer.
I recently sold a toned generic silver bar. Lady bid it up to 38.00 bucks, then after the auction emailed me and said she got carried away and hit the wrong button. she didnt want it anymore.
The best thing you can do is set your auctions so that people with 2 or more non-paying buyer cases against them can't bid on your stuff. Since I started doing that I seem to have this problem a lot less.
But there is. Since you opened a case and got your FVF refunded, the buyer automatically gets a UPI strike. Get two and your bidding is severely limited. Get three and chances are you won't be bidding again.
For me, if I haven't sold anything on eBay (which is most of the time), I don't keep money in my paypal acct. I do an echeck which takes 3-5 business days to get to the seller's acct. I always do the seller the courtesy of telling them this, and so far have had happy sellers. Do you have the option to wait longer than 72 hrs to open a case or is it automatic?
