ebay.. need advice

Umaro

need ebay advice

i put a maximum bid in of £30 on an item and then a person with zero feedback bumped the price right up to my exact maximum, i'm like -_~ this is strange. So I checked him out and he's been a registered member since January but he has no feedback at all.

i sent a message to the seller saying i thought this was suspicious and he was all like "The other buyer who had zero feedback also paid for this when sent a second chance offer. Also it was not a last minute bid. I can forward the payment sent by him if you want. I do not do shill bidding as this is against Ebay's policy. Why bid if you do not intend to pay?"

and

"He placed his bid almost 5 hours before the auction and not last minute and he also bought 2 items from me for which he had paid for both."

http://img82.imageshack.us/img82/1315/ebaystuff1da.jpg

i'd be happy to pay the £30 if I felt this was a fair auction but i really don't.

what do y'all think?

TheWaterboy

Umaro wrote:

need ebay advice

i put a maximum bid in of £30 on an item and then a person with zero feedback bumped the price right up to my exact maximum, i'm like -_~ this is strange. So I checked him out and he's been a registered member since January but he has no feedback at all.

i sent a message to the seller saying i thought this was suspicious and he was all like "The other buyer who had zero feedback also paid for this when sent a second chance offer. Also it was not a last minute bid. I can forward the payment sent by him if you want. I do not do shill bidding as this is against Ebay's policy. Why bid if you do not intend to pay?"

and

"He placed his bid almost 5 hours before the auction and not last minute and he also bought 2 items from me for which he had paid for both."

http://img82.imageshack.us/img82/1315/ebaystuff1da.jpg

i'd be happy to pay the £30 if I felt this was a fair auction but i really don't.

what do y'all think?

I see why you may feel annoyed about this but i dont think that the buyer could of pumped up the price as they never know what ure max bidding price is. Keep an eye on the zero buyers feedback to see if the seller leaves him feedback. In the meantime though i dont think you have a leg to stand on.

A Dub in Glasgo

It may be shill bidding, it may not. It is definitely a nibbler though. One way to ensure you do not attract shill bidders or nibbler bidders is to snipe the auction.

JJ

If you're not sure, report it to eBay by clicking on the "report" link at this page:

http://pages.ebay.ie/help/policies/seller-shill-bidding.html

cormac_byrne

Could easily be the case that the other bidder also thought the item wasn't worth more than £30 and stopped bidding at that point.

But it could be dodgy, especially if the seller claims to have sold to the other bidder before.
why no feedback?
and has bidder ever bought from anyone else?


Checkout the sellers previous auctions.

way to do this is:-
checkout the feedback received and left by the seller
open the auction listings and examine the list of bidders

has the other bidder been bidding on any other auctions and pushing the prices up?
has the other bidder also won other items?
has the seller been stupid enough to then relist the item?

cormie

Why did he win it at £30 if that was your max bid too? Should you not have won it at £30 since you bid £30 before him?

A Dub in Glasgo

He didn't, Umaro got the item but was a little peeved that somebody bumped up the price. Having looked into it, I do not think this was shill bidding, just a nibbler. Easy way to avoid this situation is to snipe

cormie

Oh yeah, I thought the other guy was jdoyle for a sec:o

Blackjack

A Dub in Glasgo wrote:

He didn't, Umaro got the item but was a little peeved that somebody bumped up the price. Having looked into it, I do not think this was shill bidding, just a nibbler. Easy way to avoid this situation is to snipe

what do you mean by "Snipe"?.

A Dub in Glasgo

Placing a bid in the last while of an auction, normally 5-30 seconds to go. You can do it manually or automatically (plenty of websites that will do it for you). Sniping is the best defence against shill bidding and nibblers. It is not the last bid that wins, but the person who bids the most therefore sniping will not always get you the item but I have found it a very successful technique to get items for good prices.

Eg, looking at the auction in the first post and assuming the auction had panned out with only 1 other bidder, the OP would have got the item for £17 if he had sniped it.

cormie

Sniping is the only way I bid on Ebay auctions, I don't understand why everyone doesn't do it. Although thankfully they don't. But do people who bid on an item an hour old expect not to be outbid, thus raising the price. I sniped an auction the other day, and the previous bidder's max bid was more than I was willing to pay, I upped the bid 3 or 4 times before deciding I wasn't willing to go any further:(