Key date in lot and I mised it.

I know what you mean, I place a max bid and people do that to me to. They seem to get the coin or lot for a little more than my max bid. With sniping, there is no time for someone to find your max bid. The highest bidder got this lot with the 1886 for $10 more and that one coin would pay for the lot over 4 times over. I just didn't bid high enough because I missed the semi-key and someone obviously didn't. Snipes have benefited me though as well when I bid on a coin I changed my mind about. I know some sellers will cancel your bid, if requested rather than hassle with a return. I know I would and just re-list it.

 

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I don't agree, sniping can be neutral or even beneficial. Say you have a coin worth $200 and it is sitting early at $25 and I have a $200 snipe bid set. If no one else bids I win at a very cheap price but you can't really blame the low price on the fact I used a snipe bid. But say there are two of us out there with snipes, say one at $190 and one at $200. Now it is coming up on the end at that $25. Because of that other snipe bid it is going to jump to that $200 value. If on the other hand we had been slugging it out back and forth one of us might have gotten cold feet and dropped out early. The snipe bid means that we have to commit to the maximum amount and can't have second thoughts.

They can't change the lsting, but they can always add additional information to the listing.

 

But even if you were slugging it out and two people snipe their high bids, you still lose but waste your time. I don't think that there is any set strategy to winning the auction. I obviously lost this auction because I missed the semi-key and someone else didn't. Funny I was looking at a snipe bid I used to win an auction. My final bid was $23.59 and left out the decimal point bidding $2359, after seeing the coins and checking the redbook over, I thought the coins were definitely worth it. I could have contacted the seller over the mistake but I just bought the coins. Lucky someone else didn't make a mistake.

 

What you describe is just standard auction bidding. If someone else outbids you, then they were willing to pay more than you. Probing and then retracting is a different animal and leaves you as the winner, paying more than you should have.

What they do is use a shill account to bid the auction up until either the amount goes up less than the standard increment, or until they are the highest bidder. Should they become the highest bidder, they retract their bid and leave you as the highest bidder at the highest amount you were willing to pay. This isn't just unfair, I think it meets the definition of fraud.

 

I wasn't even objecting to that sir, which I agree is illegal. I am just saying it happened to me many, many times where someone, (let's assume my example again, I bid $44 on a $10 item), bid first $15, then 22, then 26, etc. etc. until they were finally the high bidder. They NEVER would have bid as high as they did if not trying to top my bid.

Well, my bid is my business, not anyone else's, so I now choose to bid at the very last second. If they out bid me, great, God bless them and I hope they enjoy their coins. I am just not foolish enough to let them be able to "see" my highest price I am willing to pay until it is too late for them to talk themselves into bidding higher.

 

Yes when they do you do get a email saying description change and is a valid reason to retract a bid. But i was referring to situation where i have i seen sellers changing pictures or description on auction with 0 bids just hrs before it closes (due to high starting bid there are no bidders at this point) and often you get 1 or 2 snipes (basing their snipe on earlier information).

I have seen a lot of shills seem to stop just at the right price enough to get out bidded by last second snipes or last minute bidding frenzy. Not sure how they pull it off.

 

Here is a 94 but the date is off the planchet. :devil:

 

Maybe they do sir, IDK I guess. I have been buying via sniping on Ebay for about a decade or so, maybe 100 auctions a year I win, and I have never had this happen to me. If it happens in other areas then I guess I cannot comment.

 

Really? Looks like a really nice 85 to me.

 

It's hard to say what they would or wouldn't have done. If they put themselves in your position where they had to make up their mind up front about the highest price they're willing to pay, they might have put $45.

...and I see this as just one of many flaws in FeeBay's system. I think they should try to replicate the tried and true live auction format as closely as possible. Live auctions don't close at a designated time. They close after giving everyone a chance to place another bid. "Going once... going twice... SOLD!" FeeBay should do the same. If they receive a bid just before the closing time, they should extend the time by at least one minute. The fifteen minutes that other sites use is a little much, but it's better than nothing.

ETA: The reason I think the 15 minute extension is a bit much is that I have bid on vehicles on the govauctions web site and hardly anyone bids until the end. Then people bid typically outbid each other by the minimum increment. Then it seems the next guy usually waits till the end of the 15 minute period before placing his bid. I sat around once for FOUR HOURS waiting for the bidding to reach its end. If they made it one minute, it would have taken 15-20 minutes. I guess I could have just walked away and checked back the next day to see if I'd won, but I just had to watch. (I didn't win. The darn truck sold for well above blue book value...)

 

Here is an MS 1885 and an MS 1912-S. :smile

 

OTOH, people like me would simply stop Ebay altogether if they made those changes, since I have no desire to sit around on Ebay bidding. So, they may make you happy, but would lose other customers. There are reasons I do not attend live auctions any more, its simply not worth it to me. If I cannot leave an absentee bid either with the auctioneer, through an agent, or via a snipe then I will not bid. Period.

I am sure the brains of Ebay have done a similar comparison, and there are reasons they leave it the way it is.

[Edit] Didn't mean "the brains" to mean they agree with me Blaubart, I meant it as in "upper management". I see you point, and at one time agreed with you, but the current system now suits me well for sniping, and I just don't have time to babysit an auction.

 

I doubt Ebay would ever touch its bidding system (commerce engine IIRC) since it would require changes to so many different layers (UI, API and DBs), even if it can net them more $$ the updates' would very expensive and nightmare. Heck it took them 10 years to finally update their logo.

To correct myself most of listing changes have been sellers' making mistake not due to fraudulent activity, most often it is listing of gold purity, gold/silver content (example: listing 2.5 Tr. Ounce rather than .25) etc. or even using incorrect information from Krause.

 

My point was that it wasn't always terrible for the seller, I wasn't discussing the buyers.

Although for the buyers sniping is also the best strategy for buying a coin at the lowest price.

 

Yes, I noticed that, you were talking about from the seller's point of view. I would think that sniping would be good since it drives up the price. If a seller only got a bid or two people going back and fourth, the snipers can drive the price up. Not everyone always snipes though, I got a couple IHCS VF/XF for a buck when I bid with 20 minutes left after bidiots had been overbidding all night. They must have went to sleep. As far as this lot goes in this thread, I and others missed the semi-key in the lot and someone obviously didn't and placed a high because of it. The other coins were not so hot, a just noticed the 1883 with cents in it and other high cost coins but their grades were low. The lot I got had nicer coins overall.

 

Even if they changed the system, I think they should keep the proxy bidding capability. i.e. You should continue to be able to enter your max bid and walk away. If the people bidding against you want to do it one increment at a time and drag the auction out an extra 15 minutes, that's on them.

I get it. I'm sure they would have made the change a long time ago if it was in their favor to do so...

 

But its not. An intelligent bidder who currently snipes would look at this change and realize now its back to the way it was before sniping. Someone can increase their bid by a single increment just to claw their way up and find out your max. Why they bid that way I haven't a clue, but many do. If they changed Ebay that way I believe I would simply walk away from the entire process. Sniping good deals is the way I play, I do not want to get tangled in a drawn out affair, (another reason I never go to live auctions anymore), and under such a system I wouldn't feel justified spending any time even looking at Ebay any longer. As it is sometimes I can go a couple weeks without finding any quality worth bidding on, (much of the quality is now overpriced BIN auctions for ancients at least), and if I knew my max bid would be easily findable by a determined bidder I simply would not put in the effort any more.

There are other places to buy coins, and not have to wade through the schlock, dreck, fakes, and imaginery priced items for me to also have to worry about my bid price being discoverable. I am not trying to make this sound like "I would pick up my ball and go home", kind of post, but in the end Ebay would have lost its one advantage in my eyes.

Just my opinion.

Chris

 

If all eBay users were rational actors, and they all had perfect knowledge of each lot, it wouldn't matter whether you sniped or placed your bid at the beginning.

Since not all eBay bidders are rational, seeing the price go up can egg them on to bid more than they otherwise would.

Since not everyone has perfect knowledge of every lot, placing your high bid early -- where another high bidder can cause it to be exposed -- exposes your knowledge (or misconception) of the lot's worth, which can influence other rational bidders. ("Someone bid that up to $100? Let me take a closer look -- hey, is that an S on the back of that 1913 quarter?")

 

I think that the winning biodder got a helluva deal if that 86 is real! Even a genuine coins would be worth well over the $41.00 that took that one home.

 

Why is it such an issue if someone finds out what your max bid is?