View Full Version : eBay question, how do you run up auction bid?
Just won a wheelset on eBay and in the last 3 minutes it ran up to my maximum. Is there a way a seller could that so that he can rench the full bid without going over and having to reject the last over amount?
yngpunk
07-13-2011, 10:47 PM
Fortunately, the seller has no idea what your maximum bid was. What probably happened was bidders waited until the last minute to bid in hopes of getting a deal. They may have either run out of time or bailed when they reached your maximum.
As much as people dislike ebay, they're pretty fair to both buyers and sellers in terms of the bidding process.
Rueda Tropical
07-13-2011, 10:58 PM
a lot of bidding on eBay is done by sniping software which places bids in the last 60 seconds or so. People enter max they are willing to pay and bid is made automatically at last minute. SO it's common for most of the serious bids to happen in last minute.
i'm sure you just bid more than the next guy, or each entered the same amount with you placing the bid first. there are no ties on ebay...if you entered your max bid of say $500 an hour ago, but the item is still at $450 with seconds left on the auction...someone else can bid at the last second their max, maybe $500. at that point eBay will tell him he's outbid, and your max bid will be reached.
Louis
07-13-2011, 11:04 PM
check out www.esnipe.com (http://www.esnipe.com)
I use it every now and then. It works quite well.
jtakeda
07-13-2011, 11:12 PM
Almost every bid I do is through a snipe.
gixen.com
Charles M
07-14-2011, 09:38 AM
You won....
Congrats.
John M
07-14-2011, 01:26 PM
Buy definitions auctions lead to a price that is the highest offered by competitive bidders. The final sales price is not actually set by the maximum that winning bidder is willing to pay, but really the maximum that the second highest bidder (or losing bidder) is willing to pay. In this case, you won with your maximum, if the loser of the auction would have been willing to go more, you would have lost.
cdn_bacon
07-14-2011, 01:38 PM
BayGenie sniper is another one
put in your max amount. If others are sniping as well the only way you'll win is if you highest amount exceeds the other snipers.
Used to drive me nuts that people would win by exactly $1 over my bid. contacted ebay as I smelled something fishy. CSR actually told me where to get sniping software.
old_fat_and_slow
07-14-2011, 01:51 PM
(Snippage) .... Is there a way a seller could that so that he can rench the full bid without going over and having to reject the last over amount?
(Disclaimer: I have never sold anything on Ebay. I have bought numerous items though.)
It seems plausible to me that a potential seller could have multiple ID's on Ebay, and could run up the bidding by bidding in his/her auction via one of the alternate ID's. However, if a seller were to do this, he/she might run the risk of winning their own auction, and then incur a lot of unnecessary fees due to the auction listing and PayPal fees.
Seems conceivable that the seller could bid in his own auction, but again, as said above, seller doesn't know the actual bids, so he would have to do this carefully. One tactic I have seen used by other bidders to attempt to determine an actual bid is to submit successive bids that increase the max. bid by 5 or 10 dollars. For example, let's say bidder X currently has the high bid at $360, but his actual bid was $405. Bidder Y wants to be the high bidder, so he bids $370. Ebay says he's been outbid, and the max. bid shown jumps to $370. Bidder Y then submits another bid for $380. Ebay says he's been outbid, and max. bid goes up to $380. The process continues until Bidder Y becomes the high bidder.
Not saying this is a "good' strategy, just that I have seen this done before, and conceivably an unscrupulous seller could employ a similar tactic to run up the bids.
But as was said in all the previous posts, it is VERY common for the price to jump considerably in the last few seconds before an auction ends.
fiamme red
07-14-2011, 01:56 PM
It seems plausible to me that a potential seller could have multiple ID's on Ebay, and could run up the bidding by bidding in his/her auction via one of the alternate ID's. However, if a seller were to do this, he/she might run the risk of winning their own auction, and then incur a lot of unnecessary fees due to the auction listing and PayPal fees.http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/seller-shill-bidding.html
I once reported a seller to eBay for shill bidding. I found that he did it not just on the auction that I was bidding on, but on a number of other auctions too, back when bidders weren't anonymous as they are now. eBay agreed and had his ID banned.
biker72
07-14-2011, 02:23 PM
Set a reserve price..let's say $1000 on item A.
Have your eBay member friends bid up close to the reserve limit...maybe $990.
If no one outbids your friends you are not obligated to sell because the bid never reached the reserve price. I someone bids over the $1000 reserve, they win..... :)
Disclaimer: I've never done this but is one way to defeat the system.
palincss
07-14-2011, 02:39 PM
Set a reserve price..let's say $1000 on item A.
Have your eBay member friends bid up close to the reserve limit...maybe $990.
If no one outbids your friends you are not obligated to sell because the bid never reached the reserve price. I someone bids over the $1000 reserve, they win..... :)
Disclaimer: I've never done this but is one way to defeat the system.
So how is that different in any way from simply setting the reserve price as described, and then waiting for events to unfold, without the shill bids from your friends? (except, of course, that you are not cheating and violating ebay's terms of service...)
toaster
07-14-2011, 02:50 PM
What did bid history show?
Don49
07-14-2011, 02:55 PM
Set a reserve price..let's say $1000 on item A.
Have your eBay member friends bid up close to the reserve limit...maybe $990.
If no one outbids your friends you are not obligated to sell because the bid never reached the reserve price. I someone bids over the $1000 reserve, they win..... :)
Disclaimer: I've never done this but is one way to defeat the system.
Why not just set the initial bid amount to $990?
biker72
07-14-2011, 02:57 PM
So how is that different in any way from simply setting the reserve price as described, and then waiting for events to unfold, without the shill bids from your friends? (except, of course, that you are not cheating and violating ebay's terms of service...)
No one may think item A is worth $1000. However, if other people are bidding on it it must be worth the money. Feeding frenzy...I've seen it on eBay. People get crazy.
mister
07-14-2011, 03:28 PM
So how is that different in any way from simply setting the reserve price as described, and then waiting for events to unfold, without the shill bids from your friends? (except, of course, that you are not cheating and violating ebay's terms of service...)
if there is only one bidder out there willing to pay $1000 then the item won't reach $1000.
there has to be two bidders willing to pay $1000.
it's happened to me before.
i was willing to pay for an item, nobody else was, since there was a reserve i couldn't "win" the auction.
pegdrgr
07-14-2011, 03:32 PM
if there is only one bidder out there willing to pay $1000 then the item won't reach $1000.
there has to be two bidders willing to pay $1000.
it's happened to me before.
i was willing to pay for an item, nobody else was, since there was a reserve i couldn't "win" the auction.
If you do not exceed the reserve then you won't "win" the auction, and the offer price from you will not climb to your max. If you just go in and make a single offer above the reserve then you alone can place a winning bid.
forrestw
07-14-2011, 06:03 PM
I think the practice of bidding against your own auction has $ potential. The practice of a seller bidding up your his/her own auctions is probably indeed very valuable (i.e. the potential gain in auction price outweighs the cost of auction fees for when the tactic fails). The best evidence for this is in the fact that Ebay has been policing this more or less from the beginning.
Ebay has tracked user's IP addresses for a long time and of course also cookies and session data. A buyer bidding on an item from an IP that's been used by the seller of the item is an immediate flag to ebay's police and will probably have their account terminated.
I assume but don't know that Ebay also has checks to find phantom accounts used for bidding-up a given seller's auctions. This isn't hard to do; if a relatively small set of accounts frequently bids on a given seller's auctions that would be a clear signal of fraudulent activity and Ebay has full statistical data to compare against. The dishonest seller would need to accomplish several things to make such a scam work:
1. establish enough false accounts to sit under the statistical radar
2. ensure that those accounts are not all coming from the same IP address (I don't know that ebay tracks this but it's too easy to do to imagine they wouldn't)
... other stuff, left as an exercise for the reader
I think in that particular war, the cost of spoofing ebay is far higher than ebay's cost of detection.
To the OP's original question, could a seller know a given bidder's max bid?
OTOH, all of the above mainly depend on the security of Ebay's servers and practices. On the downside the 'bay has never struck me as being a site that's especially well run (e.g. they delayed instituting SSL-encrypted login for at least 2 years after it was industry standard). On the bright side if they were failing badly in this area, that fact should have come to light long ago.
sorry, delving into tech-detail and some paranoia
Technically there's another way of getting this information. Most computer users pay scant attention to security and Microsoft has been purveying operating systems with serious security flaws for many years now. This is a combination that has lead to a substantial market for what is known as 'malware' (virus/worm etc) which is paid for by organized crime and hostile governments. The primary theft is users credit-card information but it's certainly possible that a virus in your computer could be conveying your max-bid information to a third party. So it's possible OC could be scamming ebay via poor end-user security.
Yeah I think that's a bit far fetched, a whole lotta work and I doubt the potential for profit comes anywhere near the value of stealing CC info.
palincss
07-14-2011, 06:16 PM
sorry, delving into tech-detail and some paranoia
Technically there's another way of getting this information. Most computer users pay scant attention to security and Microsoft has been purveying operating systems with serious security flaws for many years now. This is a combination that has lead to a substantial market for what is known as 'malware' (virus/worm etc) which is paid for by organized crime and hostile governments. The primary theft is users credit-card information but it's certainly possible that a virus in your computer could be conveying your max-bid information to a third party. So it's possible OC could be scamming ebay via poor end-user security.
Yeah I think that's a bit far fetched, a whole lotta work and I doubt the potential for profit comes anywhere near the value of stealing CC info.
If you were going that route, it seems to me PayPal login info would be a far more lucrative target than ebay maximum bids.
forrestw
07-14-2011, 06:36 PM
If you were going that route, it seems to me PayPal login info would be a far more lucrative target than ebay maximum bids.
By which token as a boni-fide financial institution (they weren't in the past considered such) failure to adhere to best practices with respect to security *on that side of the business* would expose them to huge liability for failure to properly execute fiduciary responsibility.
I don't know what they do in practice but they *ought* to be maintaining completely separate server and protection infrastructure for the paypal part of their business. This is the same token by which CC #s should never be stored on front-end servers. This is security design 101.
[EDIT]
And last I looked when you traverse from ebay to paypal you have to give your PP password. Of course end-user security 101 is NEVER use the same password for accounts that you care about (e.g. bank, primary email, etc) that you do for the rest of the world.
I divide the internet into servers I have to trust and 'everything else' I will absolutely never use a password from the latter on the former.
Just saying :-)
palincss
07-14-2011, 06:49 PM
And last I looked when you traverse from ebay to paypal you have to give your PP password. Of course end-user security 101 is NEVER use the same password for accounts that you care about (e.g. bank, primary email, etc) that you do for the rest of the world.
I divide the internet into servers I have to trust and 'everything else' I will absolutely never use a password from the latter on the former.
Just saying :-)
Which won't help you very much if you've got a keystroke logger installed on your machine recording and relaying passwords on...
Don49
07-14-2011, 07:04 PM
Which won't help you very much if you've got a keystroke logger installed on your machine recording and relaying passwords on...
PayPal offers the option of using a throwaway, one time use, password. They will send you a free key fob size device that creates a new six digit password each time you push a button. They can validate the password because they know what number the device was seeded with. Works great.
forrestw
07-14-2011, 07:57 PM
Which won't help you very much if you've got a keystroke logger installed on your machine recording and relaying passwords on...
True, ergo I *never* login to anything important from a machine that:
I don't own
runs any microsoft operating system
I may be compromised someday, historically defense is a harder game than attack <shrug> :-)
Neves
07-15-2011, 05:55 AM
Set a reserve price..let's say $1000 on item A.
Have your eBay member friends bid up close to the reserve limit...maybe $990.
If no one outbids your friends you are not obligated to sell because the bid never reached the reserve price. I someone bids over the $1000 reserve, they win..... :)
Disclaimer: I've never done this but is one way to defeat the system.
I know someone who's done this and it got the desired results...
BumbleBeeDave
07-15-2011, 06:03 AM
check out www.esnipe.com (http://www.esnipe.com)
I use it every now and then. It works quite well.
It's cheap . . . penny per dollar.
It's convenient . . . I don't have to be sitting in front of my machine when the auction ends at 3:26am.
It keeps me from getting emotionally involved . . . and therefore bidding too much and spending too much.
Very worthwhile service!
(No, I don't work for them!)
BBD
cool, thanks for the info. so there isn't some common known to everyone but me method of getting the max bid info without the use of malware or some other special software. set my max at some odd number $728.89 so if a friend was making leaps at regular dollar intervals (they were making $20 leaps) dollars they would have a better chance of going over. i'm going to have to search on google.
Charles M
07-15-2011, 08:43 AM
no...
you set the max you want to spend and you win or lose (even with esnipe basicaaly)
Ebay has tracked user's IP addresses for a long time and of course also cookies and session data. A buyer bidding on an item from an IP that's been used by the seller of the item is an immediate flag to ebay's police and will probably have their account terminated.
I wish I could believe that. Unfortunately, eBay does not seem to care much, since this practice tends to raise the selling price, hence eBay's own profit. If eBay had any interest in stamping out corruption, they would not anonymize the bidder list.
I think i've figured it out. It's based on the automatic bid increments. In my bid since i was bidding above $500 they were in $10 increments. How many of you bid in even numbers? i don't, never have so if you want to see my max of $728.89 you bid in an even number or even intervals $10-$15-$20 and if i counter with an even number you haven't hit my max. once my counter number displays is uneven you've hit my max. here's eBay's bid increment chart http://pages.ebay.com/help/buy/bid-increments.html#how just look for the pattern.
paranonia is easy when everyone is out to get you.
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