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Ebay - Seller bidding on own items?

  • 05-09-2007 11:28am
    #1
    MGrah
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 138 ✭✭


    Should I be suspicious of a bid on ebay that pushed my bid to the max, where the rival bidder (in looking at their bid history) has the following stats:

    Total bids: 37
    Unique items: 35
    From this seller: 94%
    Unique sellers: 2
    Unique categories: 3

    This includes at least (from what I can see) 26 bids on items from the same seller in the last 24 hours.

    Am I being paranoid here? Or is there any way that the seller coule be aware of my max bid and be pushing the price up? Or even being unaware of it, chancing their arm and throwing in the round numbers that most people would use when bidding. (i.e. in this case it pushed my bid from £95 to £100)

    thanks for any advice - I'm a very inexperienced ebay user.


Comments

  • #2
    Colonel Sanders
    Closed Accounts Posts: 7,669 ✭✭✭Colonel Sanders


    there is definately a chance the seller is trying to push your bid up. Its hppened a few times to me before. I'm not sure if they can see your max bid but as you say most people bid round figures (eg £10). I have often seen 2nd bids of amounts such as 14.86 etc. Maybe I'm wrong but that always arrouses my suspicision that the seller is bidding. In the event the seller wins surely it'd be easy to leave feedback saying the buyer paid by cheque and everything was A OK the only downside for the seller is hving to pay listing/sale fees.


  • #3
    jim_bob
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 379 ✭✭jim_bob


    i normall make random bids like 9 euro 46 cents it is so you can beat people who have bid 10 Euro as they have to bet 10:46 to beat you


  • #4
    rubadub
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 32,387 ✭✭✭✭rubadub


    Easy to do, you can usually spot their feedback, go into past bids and see if the same guys were bidding on dissimilar items in a similar fashion. It is very easy to do. Say you bid €100, and opening bid is €50, then the seller logs in under another name and goes up in €5 increments. He hits €100 and is still outbid, then bids €105. Now your max bid is exposed, all he has to do is cancel his last bid! now he is max bid of €100, and you are stuck at the max.

    Few people know about the cancel trick though, a lot of the time it is people using ebay incorrectly, i.e. not putting their max bid in at the start. The same ignorant ebay users complain about sniping since they do not use ebay correctly, i.e. put in your REAL max bid.

    I used this method once to find out the reserve price on an item for a friend, there were no other bidders at the time, and it went for well above reserve so I didnt feel bad doing it.


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