YuleLog Ornament Collector's Bulletin Board Forums Discussion Ornament Collecting Discussion OT: Quick eBay Question

I've been having connection problems on my Internet so thought I'd ask here vs. trying to search with my crazy DSL right now.

Why is it on some auctions with Buy It Now, after the first bid, the BIN option disappears and with others, they can have a bid and still have BIN showing available. I guess by the one with BIN still available also has a reserve or some other setting by the seller enabled? I'm shopping for something right now and have come across various auctions that led me to asking this question.

Anybody know?

Thanks,

if you post an auction with a starting price, then add a buy it now ...but you also have a reserve price set on it, anyone can open the bid, but until it reaches the reserve price, it remains available for the buy it now because reserve is not met yet on the bids.

confusing i know, i hope i explained it to you, so you understand it.

say im selling something for 1.00 but i want to get a reserve of at least 100.00 or ill take 125.00 with buy it now.
until bids at least hit my reserve price, anyone can still have a buy it now choice.

So for example . . . you don't add it LATER but when you set up the auction

you have a BIN for 1600.00 and bids start at 800.00 with NO reserve, so when someone bids 800.00 the BIN would disappear?

Thanks~!

p.s. I love your 7 dwarfs avatar . . . that is so cool, I've searched high and low for Disney avatars and you've pretty much seen in my old posts what I've come up with and not much for animated either.

Deana, I was researching this same question a couple weeks ago, and from what I read, even without a BIN, there are some selling categories where the BIN does not go away until the bidding reaches a certain percentage (50%, 70% ??) of the BIN price. Unfortunately, collectibles didn't seem to be one of those categories.

So I'm curious, do most people buying on eBay opt for BIN or do they prefer to take their chances with the traditional auction format? With the BIN you don't have to worry about being out bid, but with the auction there is always the chance that you could get the item cheaper than the BIN price.

Also, it seems like more and more bidders are waiting until the last few hours to bid on an item - what is the advantage of waiting and bidding on it right before the auction is over? Wouldn't you want to be the first bidder with a reasonable max bid?

I've always thought that it would be interesting to do a paper on the consumer behavior of eBay.

Ginny, the category I'm trying to buy from isn't collectibles but musical instruments. Hmmmmmmm interesting. For my purchase, I'm looking for a seller with excellent feedback AND an excellent return policy. It is hard decision to go between used or new but since it is for a child, well she probably wouldn't appreciate me calling her a child, but mature and responsible and excellent care of her instrument leave a bit to be desired. I'll have to see how it goes on the auctions and either go that route or having 3 or 4 of them shipped from an internet retailer to "test" and return those that don't work out since we don't have a HUGE retailer in our area with lots in stock and seems price is an issue locally too, they want list price, OUCH. I was thinking though this morning, perhaps that little cell phone is God's gifts to Mom's to use as a tool for them to keep their room clean and other behavior modifications~!!! Bwahahahahaha Amazing how clean her room was this morning after taking it away last night at bedtime. LOL I'm rambling now, kids have that affect on me.

I always wait until the last few seconds, manually sniping (I'd probably win way too many IF I used a snipe service) and sometimes I'm successful and sometimes not . . . but I enter the maximum amount I absolutely would want to pay and figure if it is meant to be then it will with zero time left to enter another bid. I avoid bidding early to keep from getting into a bidding war with another eBayer. I don't get on eBay often, spend too much money, but I think some of the auctions you might see of similar items but very different ending prices is the result of bidding wars and often from those who are newer to the eBay experience. With access to eBay's database, which I'm sure they have loads of statistics, it would be interesting to see buying and selling patterns of various categories and of those newer to eBay vs. veterans etc. etc.

I have been doing Ebay for 10 years now both as a buyer and seller and know most of the tricks of the trade.

Personally, I think BIN's are good for items that show up on Ebay frequently. For example, when I sell ornaments and they show up quite frequently, I just look at the average price that they have sold for over the last 30 days and set that as my BIN. This makes it easy for me and hopefully the buyer. Sure, they might get lucky and buy one for a $1-$2 cheaper but I find having done this the past two years that this is a good way to sell ornaments and hopefully make it a win/win for everyone.

There are a lot of theories on auction bidding but I prefer to wait until the last second. One of Ebay's big flaws (in my opinion) is that it doesn't resemble a typical auction in that the bidding continues until the highest bid is placed. It is time sensitive so whoever the highest bidder when the auction ends, wins.

There is a certain type of collectible that I collect and I know from buying this collectible over years and years which bidders will bid big and which will not. Prior to Ebay hiding bidder ID's, I could search items being bid on by a particular bidder and find all kinds of hidden auctions that I would never have found by myself...whether or not this is ethical is beside the point. If I found a hidden auction myself, I wouldn't bid on it because I knew others were doing what I was doing. Now that isn't so easy.

I still like the idea of bidding at the last second and personally I use a sniper service so I don't have to be watching the auction. It takes the emotion out of it, I place the highest bid I'm willing to pay and let everything happen automatically. I haven't officially placed a bid yet so for example, if I change my mind, I can always delete the service from placing a bid on the item which is good. Also, if my highest bid has already been surpassed before the snipe, it will send me an email telling me and if I want to up the bid, I can do that as well. I just think if you place your high bid early, someone will peck away at it and their emotions set in sometimes getting them to bid more and more as your proxy bid kicks in so I personally believe that you will pay less using a snipe than doing it the old fashioned way but that's just based on my nonscientific personal experience.

I use to watch certain bidders too until they hid identities. Found a few good things that way.

I always thought eBay should go with the end time but somehow automatically extend the auction until 30 seconds or 60 seconds had elapsed with NO bid activity. Maybe they just like it the way it is, but this way would make them more money in ending fees or maybe too difficult to program but I'd think an excellent programmer could write the software for that time sensitive calculation.

Wow! I didn't realize that there was an automated sniper service! I guess I just always assumed that there were 4 or 5 people sitting at their computers waiting to manually out bid me.

Does eBay record these snipers as someone watching the auction? The reason I ask is that last weekend I listed a few items and it seems like there are a lot of people watching my items for the small number of bids I've recieved (one item has had 4 watchers but no bids for 2 days). I wonder if there will be a sniper frenzy right before my auctions end (*fingers crossed*).

in response to several post here:

first of all i prefer a buy it now, i too feel it makes things soo much easier to get.

second,as far as the snipping goes, i have done that before as well, but i do sometimes like the rush when you manually snipe yourself in the last 30 seconds and win !! what a rush
but that goes both ways..god knows i"ve been bumped out of a bid in the last seconds by a snipper too

as far as the bidders hidden id"s go, after the auctions end, if you were watching it you can click back on the auction, and it will then show the full user name of the person who won it.

and also, as far as watchers go.. sometimes i will watch an item, not that i want to bid on it, but that i want to sell the same thing and am watching to see what price it will bring.

Ditto on the rush. I usually get my bid in with 4-8 seconds remaining so a real rush. But today again with my Internet connection acting up (I saw Bell South etc. trucks along the highway near here) I'd be really ticked, as was the case one morning when I was trying to buy some stock at the first few seconds of an IPO, oh I was MAD that morning.

There are times that I am unsure whether I want to bid on an auction item and i'll watch that item; however, most of the time I forget about it until the auction has ended and it's long been sold.

I've also found that I generally pay less when I snipe than if I bid early. Usually I use esnipe (www.esnipe.com) for this.

I set up lots and lots of "watches" but most of them I have no intentions of bidding on. Either I'm just curious how much something will end up going for, or like someone said, it lets me know how much I might expect to get if I have the same item for sale.

And yes, I admit also to having watched certain bidders before they made them anonymous! (G) It often helped me find an item I was interested in.

I loved being able to check on other bidders.I found items that I might have overlooked. It also helped to know who was bidding against me.

Yes, you can see who won the auction afterwards but not who is bidding on the auction at the time. I still know who a few people are since I have been able to decipher who is who. As I said before, they would sometimes find hidden auctions that I would not have found on my own and would bid on them. I could simply complete a search by bidder and potentially find items that I'm interested in but would have never found myself because the listing title was wrong.

To answer the question about watching and sniping, no you don't have to be a watcher to be a sniper. You simply type the item # you want to snipe, how much you want to bid, and how long before the auction is over before it hits (I give it about 4 seconds just to allow the servers to connect but too short for someone to manually snipe my snipe). For someone to watch, you have it on your watch list but again you don't have to have it on your watch list to snipe it if that makes sense.

There is a way to extend auctions, EBAY just chooses not to do it. Overstock.com had their auctions set up in such a way that if a bid would come in, the auction would extend 5 more minutes and continue to do so until all bids ended after time ran out. I don't know what if anything this would do for EBAY since the majority of people that buy on EBAY frequently use some type of sniping service which is why you see all kinds of action in the last few seconds of most auctions. I would think if EBAY reprogrammed their service to extend the bidding, a Sniping Service would simply reprogram their service to place proxy bids up to your maximum and essentially the same ending price I suspect so no real benefit for Ebay to program this.

Didn't eBay used to extend the auction if a bid came in at the last minute? It really seems like that used to happen, back in 1999 or earlier, when eBay was still pretty new...

No, it always ended when it ended.

I think there was a time when it was difficult to place a snipe bid because high speed internet access wasn't prevalent.

Now you can update very quickly if you want to do it manually and a couple of smart people developed some sniping programs that do the bidding for you.