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How eBay Sellers Fix Auctions
Boj writes "The Times online is carrying stories on fraud carried out on eBay using shill bidding. Citing eBay's changes to security as aiding the shill bidders and this fraud:
"Last November eBay changed its rules to conceal bidders' identity — making it even more difficult for customers to see whether sellers are bidding on their own lots.""
Ebay knows about this type of fraud and other types and they do very little to combat.
Go to ebay and do a search on 'wholesale list'. You will find people attepting to deceive the buyers, I'll even say that much of this is fraud.
I would bet that among the 'power sellers' (and others) there were organized 'teams' of people that artifically jack up the prices for profit.
Now, if ebay KNEW about these practices and did nothing to stop them, could they be found liable?
I have been a victim of Ebay fraud, complained and heard nothing back. I sucks, but I now expect that from both ebay and paypal.
"Last November eBay changed its rules to conceal bidders' identity making it even more difficult for customers to see whether sellers are bidding on their own lots."
What this also does is it keeps people that wish to help fix the problem from doing so. IE, I see an obvious fraud attempt on EBAY and try to contact the people that are about to be screwed. I can't do it.
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
Am I the only one failing to see the damage done here?
Ok, so I've used eBay and I know there's a "Reserve Price" option for an auction. You set it when you start the auction and if the bids never crest that benchmark, you are under no obligation to provide product/service for amount tendered.
Now, that said, I will concede that a "Reserve Not Yet Met" sign on an auction will cause me to over look an auction. I feel less like I'm getting a deal if that phrase is staring me down. I will also mention that the more bids on an auction the more desirable it is to me (childish, I know, but hey I'm human).
Now, on the other hand, if I were an seller, I could think of a thousand ways to simulate bids. Configure a friend's computer on the other side of the country to forward my internet traffic, for one. And then the cat and mouse game between eBay and I would begin. And what would happen? eBay would have to spend a lot of time investigating this stuff. A lot of time and resources. Only to do what? Send me a nastygram asking me to use Reserve Prices next time? Place a black star next to my name to let bidders know I've been known to use shill bids? Social stigmas of some other sort?
In the end, who cares? eBay should keep it in their TOS & simply let people know that professional seller often practice this. You're not going to find the same deals on eBay that you'd find at some middle of nowhere country farm house liquidation auction where you have to show up in person and stomach 8 hours of farm tools and the worst BBQ lunch sandwiches you've ever tasted.
My work here is dung.
Am writing this book. Pre-register to buy it on Ebay! now.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it doesn't seem to matter all that much if you can't see the identity of the bidder. Isn't it pretty trivial to have some small network of people that agree to shill bid for each other?
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
I have been a victim of Ebay fraud, complained and heard nothing back. I sucks, but I now expect that from both ebay and paypal.
Enough said.
Only pay what you can afford and what you think something is worth. If a seller out bids you on their own product. Fine, let them keep it.
Personally, I avoid eBay like a plague. it's got sucker written all over it.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
It seems like for every listing I see, reserve price == Buy it Now price.
Perish the thought!
Monstar L
The way eBay pricing is set up (percentage of winning bid amount plus flat fee), eBay welcomes the shill whether they act like they do or not. eBay still gets their piece of the action and the seller is still stuck with the item they need to sell. The seller could just create new shills each time they're needed and cry dead bidder to eBay, but once you start to hurt eBay's bottom line, I'm sure they'll notice and take action.
As long as Ebay makes money on higher prices they have no incentive to stop this type of fraud.
Yes, everyone run around and complain as much as you want, this isn't going to change.
Whatever, I never trusted auction sites anyway.
A blog about stuff.
People must be pretty dense if they didn't know this.
It is also pretty common for sellers to pose as different entities - if you follow enough links for similar sales, you'll pretty quickly find that they al lead back to the same store.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Since there's nothing whatsoever to prevent you doing this of course its going to be widespread.
At the last office I was contracting in the whole lot of them would bid on each others auctions to push the price up, they were even having a competition amongst themselves to see who could push the price the most above the actual price of the item and still have someone buy it.
I've only ever sold one item on E-Bay and it's a very tempting course of action, the only reason I didn't bid myself is because the price was twice what I had expected anyway.
As eBay gets a fixed percentage of each auction, they actually profit as well from this shill game.
As another poster said ebay makes money off ALL auctions. Fraudalent auctions earn ebay the same amount of money as real auctions.
Just remember Ebay is a flea market. The kind most people wouldn't enter if it existed as a real building. Treat going there as such and you won't get burned.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Then what the seller does is send you a "second chance" email if you are the last bidder saying that the original bidder didn't pay or what not and lets you pay what they were offering for the item. The Second Chance is now an offical Ebay thing... which of course is being abused by the Shrills...
What stinks the most with eBay is that now sellers can sell their items at fixed price. It sorts of defeats the purpose of auctioning an item.
if now sellers do shill bidding eBay should simply remove the auctioning possibility and just call themselves eFleamarket or something.
But they're much too happy selling at a high price with shill bidding or even higher when the item is rare.
meh...
The only good thing about eBay is the possibility of finding rare/no-longer in production items. That's probably i still go from time to time even when i know i pay more than what its worth.
If you look like your passport photo, you're too ill to travel. - Will Kommen
I tend to agree with the people saying "Who cares?" about this practice. When placing bids on eBay, you should know from the start how much you're willing to pay for the product you're interested in. If you think "Cool! I'm winning this radio for only $5.00 and it's easily worth $200!" and then the seller enters a number of shill bids, bumping the price up to $150 - fine. He/she is *really* saying "Sorry pal! I'm not letting go of this $200 radio for only $5.00!" Fair enough. The auction hasn't ended yet. The worst he/she really did to you was get your attention with the artificially low starting price and make you think for a little while you were getting a "steal" on the radio.
Now, you have to make a decision. Will you pay a "fair price" for this radio, or will you duck out, saying "Oh well, I don't want one THAT bad. I was just hoping the seller was going to lose his/her ass on the sale." ? It's still completely up to you. And if you bail out, the seller has a real good chance of not getting a buyer at all, causing him/her to pay the listing and re-listing fees for nothing.
From real auctions to online, I try to research the items and set a value to me without looking at the expected prices. Then I write down the max I would possibly offer for something and in the auction, I stick to it regardless of frenzied bidding. If someone else wants it worse than I do, I let them have it. It keeps me from overpaying at auctions.
Sometimes I spot a nice item I don't have a need for and sometimes toss in a token bid. That's how I got my punch bowl set with 12 glasses and a silver ladle for $5. I never expected to win the bid, but it was overlooked and I wound up with it.
I don't spend much time on e-bay. I don't win many bids there.
The truth shall set you free!
You ultimately vote with your dollar on this one.
-If an auction costs more then you want to pay, DON'T BID.
-If a seller looks like they are cheating, DON'T BID.
And ultimately if you feel you have been cheated don't pay, sure you might get a negative feedback but why put up with unfair pricing. If you don't pay people will STOP doing it because they won't sell.
Shill bidding or not... the buyer still enters their maximum price that they are willing to pay for that particular item. If you don't want to pay that much, then don't bid that high! The complaints seem a little misplaced to me. Plus, the fact that everybody and their brother uses eBay now doesn't help prices.
I quite often see items where the bid goes above the price the item would cost new retail, or at the "buy it now" price from another seller. Now I have a pretty low opinion of Joe Public's intelligence, but that's pushing it. Surely most people have enough sense to check what things are actually worth before bidding, in which case a lot of those overly high bids must be this kind of fraud?
Oh no... it's the future.
If only there was a way people weren't forced into bidding on overpriced items available in online auctions!
Oh wait... they aren't!
Shill bidding only affects morons who get caught up in the bidding frenzy and pay more than they wanted to for the item anyway. It doesn't affect anyone who knows what price they want to pay for what they're looking for.
I buy a lot of stuff on eBay. But I don't do any sniping, or bid hunting, or anything else. I just add things to my eBay watch list, and wait until 5 minutes before auction close, when Unwired Buyer calls my cell phone. I then either bid a bit higher than the current price on the item if it's at the right price, otherwise, I just hang up.
IMO this is the pinnacle of eBay services. No extra fees, and I can get the items *I* want with minimal hassle or worry.
I don't have a problem with it. It has happened and will continue to happen. What I have the biggest problem with is the "Second Chance Offer." I have bid fair price on many (one of a kind) items only to get out bid by something that looks like a shill account. After the auction ends the seller makes a second chance offer to me at the price of the highest bidder.
So I bid 10$ on an item that I am willing to pay 10$ for, Some one outbids me and the number goes to $11, I up the bid to $15 and am again outbid 1$ at a time. At this point I walk away. I then get a second chance offer to buy the item for the 17$ high bid. What makes me even more suspicious is when the same item is then relisted and the pattern repeats itself.
In all honesty, it's e-bay, It is not worth getting worked up over! You win some and you loose some. If you think the seller is a ripoff, add them to your favorite sellers list and put a note stating your opinion of them. Then make sure you do not buy from them again. It would be nice if E-Bay offered a way to tag sellers you do not want to do business with and let you ignore there listings.
Suppose that I'm selling a valuble widget that I want to sell for $6. However, the highest bid so far is $4. Suppose I bid $5 on my own auction. Then there are two possibilities:
1. No one bids more money. I end up paying Ebay to sell it to myself.
2. Someone bids the $6 I want and I sell it to them. Clearly they are still willing to pay $6 for it so I don't think I've 'harmed' them.
Basically, if I bid up my own auction I increase Ebay's profits, harm no one else, and potentially hurt myself. Why on earth should EBay stop this? They have no motivation to do so- no one is being harmed except the people who do this (and then only sometimes).
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
>Now, if ebay KNEW about these practices and did nothing to stop them, could they be found liable?
What CAN they do to stop them though? (Without completely destroying their business)
How is it possible for Ebay to tell the difference between an account that just doesn't bid all that much because they're trying to be cheap vs. an account that is shill bidding?
if you don't want to pay more than $50 for an item, DON'T BID MORE THAN $50 FOR IT. for christ's sake, this isn't rocket science.
Not that e-bay has ever been a real auction anyway (how many auctions have you been to that end just when everyone starts bidding?), but several other auctions (see Barret-Jackson) allow owners to do this, they don't care because it still counts as a sell and the owner has to pay the commission. I for one wouldn't want to let a $100K car go for 20 just because no one there wanted it that day. I think this article was written by someone bitter that they didn't get that ipod for $20.
I don't understand why this kind of activity is illegal. If someone wants to bid for their own stuff, they risk having to buy it in and pay the auctioneer's fee.
On the other hand, there is nothing to stop a shop from putting any value it likes on some goods, and if someone thinks it is worth it and will pay, that is perfectly OK.
What's the difference? Some confused thinking here by legislators who think when people are at an auction they lose their common sense...
Shill bidding isn't illegal, its just against ebay's terms and conditions.
The same goes for the cure against shill bidding - bid sniping - which if done with software is against ebay's terms and conditions.
Either way though - pick the amount that you are willing to pay fo the item and bid it. Don't bid more than that.
If everyone did that then the system would work perfectly, alas the problems start when you add humans to the equation.
Now if you'll excuse me I have a mobile phone to ship to a guy in nigeria - what a sucker he was too!! I forced the bidding up with my friends account and got 3 times what the phone is worth and I already have an email from paypal saying he has paid!
$_="Slashdotter";$syn="OTT";s;..;;;sub _{print shift||$_};s!ash!Perl !;s=$syn=ack=i;tr+LLEd+BLAH+;_"Just Another ";_
the best thing about ebay is, anyone can place bids...
the worst thing about ebay is, anyone can place bids...
considering the darker & greedier side of human nature this should be expected...
this is why i never buy anything from ebay, and do most my shopping @ brick & mortar mostly and only buy on line from reputable online retailers, it is worth the extra few bucks for peace of mind and a guarantee and/or warrenty...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Grammar policing aside, eBay is really doing more damage to the younger generation than we would care to imagine.
In my county, we have petitioned the authorities to put a blanket ban on the site. Why? It appears that suddenly the youth have 'spending power'. Therefore, we're seeing more and more young people, and I'm talking 5th graders, devoting a greater deal of their energies to buying and selling items online using their elder sibling/parent's credit cards than studying or playing outside.
What used to take place on the playground for items of equal value has now moved online for money. Parents are talking about groups of youngsters threatening others into bidding for their items.
All in all, I think eBay is definitely something our community can do without.
And how are they going to solve that problem?
If you want something to go high, you have half of your family bid on your items.
The problem with shill bids is that there's no similar recourse for the buyer. If the buyer's bid is a contract, then why shouldn't the seller's offer to agree to the honest outcome of the auction also be a contract?
I bid on a Ducati SS 900 that was locally for sale. Long story short is that I was outbid over and over by one other. Well, end of the auction and the other user 'won' but then I got a 'second chance offer'. Turns out the sell was the other bidder and got caught. He thought it was funny until I walked away with my cash in my pocket. He re-listed and did the same thing again until I warned the new bidder. I drive by the fool's hosue about once a week and the bike is still there.
Please note for future reference
Considering how eBay gets paid (e.g., they get more money when the closing bid is higher), it behooves them to allow and even to encourage shill bidding to jack up the auction price. Follow the money!
I always looked at shill bidding as helping the bidder buy the item. If you're selling a $10,000 car, the auction is at $8000, and only one person is bidding, you really only have two options: shill bid or cancel the auction/don't sell the car. You can talk about TOS's and everything else, but the bottomline is no one will take that hit.
I've been staying away from eBay for years now - since I noticed they allow, nay encourage, sellers to bid up their items before an auction even starts!! I think it's called a minimum bid. Now, I know you're thinking shill bidding is even worse because it can LURE you in. Well, I've seen auctions that describe items with words such as: all-purpose, hard to get, 5 star quality, etc. Talk about temptation. Now here's a big surprise - item descriptions are not always from a company fact sheet or professional review!! It's like they're trying to take your money. Until eBay forces all auctions to start at 1 penny and only permits descriptions written by objective 3rd parties, I suggest we stop supporting these insane fraud-friendly practices. At least I hear you can still get a nwt coach purse from china for $13.27 + s/h! One more thing, these practices don't just completely rip off buyers, but they protect sellers from getting ripped off by me. Afterall, if I wanted to pay a reasonable price for something, I'd go to a store. eBay suxxorz. If you're like me, you'd better stay away from it, HSN and QVC.
its just ridiculous because they're already determined its a valid dispute.. the stupid bastards cancelled all his auctions and suspended the seller's account.. doesn't that give me the right to automatically start this damn dispute so I can get my money back? of course not.. I could of stopped payment on the Money Order, but I rather keep this fight with eBay going.. there's still quite a bit of work they need to do to stop all this fraud.. I've filed formal complaints with I3C and with the USPS for mail fraud..
I guess what is equally as ridiculous is the fact that someone would go through so much time listing auctions for a measley 30 bucks, and having the possibility of getting charged for mail fraud and being under investigation by the IC3..
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
mod parent up please.
"I was just hoping the seller was going to lose his/her ass on the sale."
This is what every ebay buyer has in mind when they go shopping on ebay.
That practice takes place in real auctions, too. Auctioneers make a percentage of the final tally. At my father-in-law's estate auction, the auctioneer got 10% up to $100,000 and then took 9% if it went over that. Well anyways you'll sometimes get a less-than-reputable auctioneer paying someone to work the crowd and try to up bids so he gets more in the end. Then, often times auctioneers will have a year-end auction where they sell stuff that never gets claimed, and they'll sell the stuff they cheated people out of here, too. Of course, if they're ever found out, they can never work again in 5-state area here in the Midwest, since farmer news travels fast. But it does happen, and it's not new to eBay
It's easy to not get taken by shills on eBay, you just don't bid more than you want to pay. If you don't get the price you want, then you find another item. The shills don't get anything from you if they screw up and push you over your maximum. Sure, it's fraudulent to shill, but it's irrelevant if you bid how you're supposed to instead of changing during the auction.
They have to keep peoples perception of how trustworthy they are high enough that they will do business on ebay(especially buyers...). I think I might have bid on a few auctions a few years ago(I don't remember anymore), but I never won, and I have never offered anything for sale on ebay, and everything I see says that the risk of fraud is much higher than I am willing to deal with. The worst part is that it ends up operating as a fairly efficient market, with lots of people bidding even on obscure items, and stuff goes for 'market' price anyway. This takes away the incentive to try to play the game and makes Newegg and Amazon that much more attractive.
(Amazon is winning the checkout/shipping battle handily as far as I can tell, but buy stuff like ram and cameras at newegg because amazon has horrible prices and generally doesn't rotate stock fast enough)
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Not true. Ebay is much worse. At a flea market, I can look at the product and I have it in hand when I give the guy my money.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
There are quite a few regulations set up to prevent price manipulations just like this in stock market world. Fraud is the term used in these regulations. It is also strictly prohibited to do wash sales when benefitiary on both sides share common interest.
It looks like Ebay is asking for goverment oversight in a similar manner.
a fair auction isn't one where you pay the maximum price *YOU* would be prepared to pay for something... its where you pay the maximum price *THE NEXT HIGHEST BIDDER* would have payed for it.
Shilled auctions DEFRAUD the bidder of the difference between those prices. Period.
Oh and btw (not directed at parent poster...) shilling is NOT equivalent to setting a reserve price on an auction. Reserve prices are set before an auction starts and represent the lowest price the seller would be willing to sell for. Not the same thing AT ALL.
Nobody goes to an auction (or auction website) with the intent of paying what something is worth. If that were they're intent they'd go to ... what are those places called ... oh yeah, stores!
You can filter most of the crap out if you're looking for something specific, as opposed to just browsing. I've got searching to hunt for PS2 games I want at cheap prices, and have managed to amass a pretty nice library for about 1/4 the cost of buying it in town (literally, I pay an average of about $7 bucks a game).
You still can't filter out everything of course. e.g. Ebay won't let you filter out people who don't list actual shipping charges or who set a reserve price. But for the most part, it's the same few asshats that shill in each category and once you spot them you filter them out specifically, and then you filter out a few common scams (1 CENT GAMES111!!!). Do that and you'll get a pretty clean search.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I buy computers of UK ebay. Sellers their are a lot more obvious in their scamming. They will sell you a computer, but hype up one or two parts of it, like the hard drive and the memory. Then claim ignorance when you challenge then, and require you to send the parcel back - so you lose the initial postage, plus whatever it costs to return it. Bastards. It is funny how whenever they make a mistake, it is always in the higher region, rather than the lower region (ie. I have never gotten a computer which listed with a 20GB harddrive, and actually had 30GB)
I mean, come on, on eBay, *you set your own frigging price.* If you don't want to pay so much for something - DON'T BID IT.
If someone's logging into your ebay account and making bids in your name - *that's* fraud. If someone's making you pay more dearly for something than you'd rather - that's life.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
But the idea that I would be duped into spending more than I want to is a difficult thing to accept. I suppose if I arbitrarily set in my mind a max price of '~x' and the auction was 'x-k' with k getting progressively smaller until ->=~0 then I would still not feel cheated. I can't imagine bidding on something over and above what I wanted to spend for it. Ok maybe a shade more but not enough to worry about it. I'm sure whatever you want on eBay, if not this time, is bound to around in a few minutes anyway. Or, if it's not then one-off items maybe aren't the things you should look for on eBay. eBay is like the world's garage sale, not flea market. So when you go to a garage sale, how badly are you going to want that one piece of junk? Oh well I guess people insist on being protected from themselves.
Bingo! IMO, eBay works perfectly; you go in and say "I will pay X amount for this". There are only two reasons you would change your mind and want to pay more.
1. The item actually becomes more valuable to you. (This incorporates all supply and demand metrics.)
2. You feel obligated to compete with other bidders.
Shill bidding leverages the stupidity of people who easily fall prey to motivation #2.
However, shill bidding does something else. Assume you place an item on eBay for $10 reserve, and the bidding rapidly goes to $100. You do a little research, and find the actual fair market value for this item is $500. A shill bid can effectively raise your reserve to $300, actually correcting your mistake during the auction. If nobody takes that bait, you keep the $500 item and pay the commission on $300.
Additionally, I may have a legitimate offer from someone local. Perhaps someone came by and saw the item on a shelf somewhere, and actually offered $300 for it. The $300 "shill" bid is then perfectly reasonable, because there is a bona fide offer for it.
These two instances are actual cases of motivation #1 on the part of the seller: the item actually becoming more valuable. It seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Microsoft cheerleader, blue flag waving, you got a problem with that?
Ban an account which only bids on one persons goods. Pretty simple. Sure, you can't tell straight away, but after a weeks activities you can gather some useful statistics. They could also check IP addresses.
Not (entirely) true. Ebay makes MORE money if your products sells for more. It's called Final Value Fee, which is a percentage of the final price. If you item sells for $1, they get $0.05. If your item sells for $25, they get $1. They are in fact interested for this practice to continue.
$signature =~ s/$signature//;
That's a ridiculous argument. If a kid is going to bully someone into bidding on an eBay item, they're just as likely to bully them for any other reason. Bullies actually existed long before eBay.
Never bid higher than you think something is worth. Further, I would suggest just bidding once: the maximum bid you would make... adding cents to the bid is often helpful to that end. (ex: max bid of $20, I might make it $20.03 or something like that)
Another rule is never risk more than the amount of money you feel comfortable risking. Determinations for that level of risk vary from person to person, but don't decide how you feel about it until you have read that seller's feedback and looked at the other items this person has bought or sold. If you still get a good feeling about it, then great!
*ALWAYS* look at the forms of payment accepted. People get caught up into uncomfortable payment situations when they don't notice beforehand.
*ALWAYS* know what the shipping costs are. This is a great one to pay attention to. If you think a PS3 for $20 is a great deal, check the shipping cost. It might be well over $500 or something ridiculous like that. Shipping costs are rarely, if ever, refundable.
These may seem like common sense for everyone, but common sense goes out the window when a buyer "really wants something" bad enough. It's that "really want it" disorder that really gets people mixed up into things they shouldn't... this "really want it" disorder is the reason spammers are so successful. Most sane people know they shouldn't buy from people who hide their identities, but when they "really want it" common sense just fades away. It's really like religion and beliefs in gods... they really want it, so logic, reason and common sense just fade away where that issue is concerned.
Shamefully (or shamelessly), I was caught doing this few years ago. I had another eBay ID that I was using to increase the bid artificially. And I got caught (I haven't done it again, BTW).
How? eBay does make some effort to detect patterns. Such as the IP address from where you post, etc. It's not fool proof, and there are easy ways around it (such as posting through an open proxy, ad nauseum).
Point being is that despite whatever rules they changed about user's identity, I can believe they take shill bidding seriously, still, and are actively seeking them out.
So, don't do it.
Just do your research! If a widget normally sells for $50 then don't go above that no matter how much you want it. If you do, you get what you deserve.
Very easy solution - sealed bidding - working exactly as it is now, but don't resolve the bids until the auction closes. Sellers would usually make a bit more this way, because of the uncertainty and shill bidding would be actively discouraged by the fact that you'd be stuck with the having to transfer funds and pay associated paypal etc fees if you try to shill bid above what someone's willing to pay. Buyers would be more likely to pay a fair price, because they would continue to bid a fair price, and not have that price jacked up at the end by sniping and shill bids.
Sniping would become a good bit harder also, so the days of people refreshing the page every 2 seconds would go away. Sounds like a win for everybody.
For me the key point is that the ebay market is set up so that either a bidder is the only bid or they barely beat all competitors. Shill bidding breaks that so it isn't fair to the bidders. Second, sellers already have "reserve". The seller above could easily set reserve to $150 and honestly conduct the auction without concern that they'll be forced to sell for a lower price. Third, a shill bidder can provide the illusion that something is more valuable than it really is. I guess that's another reason to snipe auctions. It's harder to get shilled out of the best price possible then.
I have often wondered if eBay is being used for money laundering. Here's how it might work.
Let's say you have $10,000 to launder. Your in some country with loose banking laws and you want to get it into the U.S. So you have a confederate list on eBay an expensive item that does not have registration on it, boat and cars are out but diamonds and rare coins are useful.
Now there really isn't any goods being sold here just an eBay auction to provide cover for where this $10,00 came from. The auction is set to exist for the minimum amount of time to avoid any outsiders form bidding and the description and placement of the item is such that will make it unlikely to be discovered. You might also add some shill bids on the item to make it all look legit.
So now our person with the money (person 1) "bids" on the item which he wins. He then sends to his partner the "payment" the dirty money via PayPal. The 'buyer' person 1, then sets up a normal U.S. based PayPal account and then the process is reversed with another fake item listed this time the partner (person 2) bids and pays into the normal U.S. based account the $10,000, the money being laundered, that money is then removed and used as normal as it now has what would appear to be a perfectly reasonable source, the sale of an the "items" on eBay.
Personally, I avoid eBay like a plague. it's got sucker written all over it.
Well, that may be. But they stay in business for a reason. If I have something to sell, I can reach a larger market than I can locally. And when I'm looking for some uber rare item that it would take years and thousands of dollars in gasoline to find by scouring every used record store, book store, person's home, etc., ebay comes in very handy.
I've only been burned a couple of times (out of several hundred transactions) and then only for low value items.
My own personal strategies for a succesful transaction include:
1) Never bid on camcorders, computers, automobiles, or any other high dollar item.
2) Always do an extensive check of the seller's feedback.
3) Don't bid early or get involved in bidding wars. Snipe instead.
So it's ebay's fault that your country is full of parents who can't control their children's behavior?
I guess you should close down brick & morter storefronts if you see too many 5th graders inside using their parents money as well, right?
Your entire argument is nonsense.
First time I've seen the think-of-the-children argument used against ebay.
Whether they mask it or not, it is usually evident that people have either multiple eBay accounts to be able to bid on their own auctions, or they simply have their friends do it. Hell, once I noticed no one was bidding on an item I posted, so I had my friend bid on it once to see if we could get some action on the damn thing.... unfortunately no one bid on it, my friend won the big, but luckily he didn't make me sell him my computer for $50 :D "A+++ Excellent Ebayer!"
Relocating to San Francisco / Palo Alto... Hire me?
this is why I don't feel one bit bad about using ebay bid snipers to place a last second bid on an item that I want. yes I'm a cheap bastard, but it sure helps to stop the shill bidders.
Yes, it does matter, because dishonesty is dishonesty and fraud is fraud, but it seems to me that there is a perfectly simply buyers' algorithm:
a) Look at the item. b) Ignore any minimum bids, reserves, "buy it now" prices, current bid, history, etc; look only at the item itself. c) Decide how much you are willing to pay for it, shipped; d) determine the shipping cost; e) bid your maximum less shipping; f) take no further action whatsoever. Do not change your bid in response to any other ongoing bidding. If you are willing to raise it later, you weren't being honest with yourself when you determined your maximum earlier.
It seems to me that this makes you completely immune to sniping, shill bidding, etc. The only issues that remain are: a) the possibility of frequently being disappointed by not winning the auction; b) the unfairness of being unable to distinguish in advance between honest sellers, with which you may have a chance of getting a bargain if there are few other interested bidders, and dishonest ones, where there are always other interested bidders (i.e. shills).
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I grew up in the middle of nowhere, Minnesota. My father often worked from 4 AM to 9 PM so I didn't see much of him. Occasionally, there'd be an auction in the summer when I didn't have school and it'd be on a Saturday when I wasn't needed on other farms picking rock or bailing hay. And I'd get to come along and sit in silence with my dad as he mulled over screeders, forms & other utensils dealing with his trade, cement. If the price was right, we'd pick up boxes of old coins and I'd get to flip through them--funny how you could find 500 mercury dimes (truly assorted) for 10 cents apiece! Now that was $50 (1990's money) well spent.
And now we come to the sandwiches. Every time I went one (no matter where it was), they would sell BBQ sandwiches for 50 cents. They were very sweet and the meat was often real meat. At the time, I don't think I was used to something that wasn't ground chuck or hot dogs. My dad wolfed them down like god himself had cooked them. My dad was a trash compactor. I liked food, but probably half as many things as he did. I've slowly come around and now eat all the horrible things he used to--pickled jalepenos, sardines straight from the can, eggs cooked in bacon grease, egg coffee, oatmeal with various things mixed into it, bratwurst, etc. And the weird thing is that I now love them (although I have not had lutefisk that I've liked yet). What I use to look at with disgust I now find myself craving. I think my dad was the same way at a young age, I'm not sure why.
So, in the end, you're right. They probably are the best BBQ sandwiches out there, I just didn't realize it at the time. I had been used to institutionalized food at school or cheap ground meat and found the texture and taste of the real thing scary. And this completes my offtopic post, mod away.
My work here is dung.
"it's got sucker written all over it" Only if you don't know what you should be paying for something. If you sign up to pay whatever is asked for the first thing you see, then yes, you are a sucker. If you know the reasonable going price for a similar item in other places, then you have enough knowledge to decide if the one on Ebay is worth the price and the risks. You can get ripped off at Circuit City and Target as easily as on Ebay. The difference is brick'n'mortar stores are easier to complain to. But they typically cost more. And they should. Your risk reduction and purchase convenience cost money, and you pay for them.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I have to say that trying to claim someone somehow *forced* you pay too much for an item, after you already agreed to it by entering a maximum bid is pretty laughable. How does creating the illusion of high demand for your useless junk amount to criminal fraud? Sure, it might seem unethical, but how is it any worse than writing a clever description for an item that makes it seem better than it really is? (Just like all those other modern advertisements you're exposed to hundreds of times each day.)
If you've actually been a "victim" of a shilled auction, maybe you should focus on becoming a more intelligent buyer, rather than accusing the seller for being creative enough to draw you into a legally binding sale. Nothing illegal has happened here. You lost no more money on the item than you were willing to pay for it. The only thing that did happen is that greed/hoarding instincts or need for instant gratification overruled your judgement for that fraction of a second where you clicked the "submit bid" button before looking for any other sellers offering the same item.
A sucker truly is born every minute... and no place shows it more than eBay.
8==8 Bones 8==8
A more precise analogy would be if I could flood the market with phantom sellers, artificially driving the prices down for legitimate sellers by attracting legitimate buyers away from an item I want to buy. But, buyers can't get away with that - false auctions are incredibly easy to detect (ie, no item shows up). :) Sellers can (and are) getting away with flooding the market with phantom buyers, driving prices up. eBay tolerates this practice because they make marginally more money on this scam (though that's subject to suffer if public opinion changes for the worse over time).
To me, the "shill" is a good way to fake a reserve/high-starting-bid. After all, the reserve and the high-starting-bid scare buyers away - the former because nobody even looks at reserve items, and the starting-bid because most people sort by price so they never see it.
Think about it - the item goes on sale for $1 - low enough to get to the top of all the "sort by price" lists. This gets the item tons of attention - lots of watchers and bidders. Then the seller can crank the item up to his "reserve" price with a shill. The item, already having the attention of other bidders, may get pushed higher still and sold - or else the buyer will only have to pay the selling fee.
Really, I'm shocked that ebay hasn't simply deprecated the original two methods (starting-price and reserve) and simply introduced bidding on your own wares as the official way to do it.
"Last November eBay changed its rules to conceal bidders' identity -- making it even more difficult for customers to see whether sellers are bidding on their own lots." You used to be able to see the other bidder's names during the auction. Now they just say "bidder 1", "bidder 2", etc. The real identities were nice because you could see patterns especially when certain bidders appeared a lot or one seller's auctions had similar low feedback bidders.
I don't know how he pulled it off, but he ended an auction with 30 seconds left. I was fairly pissed off and told him so. Never bought another thing from him.
I would much rather that he put in a reserve or set the starting price at the lowest price he would accept.. instead of being so deceitful.
I agree with above posters.. ebay sucks now. Only bid what you are willing to lose because it really has become a crap shoot.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
In that case we still go with the 'no harm, no foul' theory. No one is harmed by the auction ending- the seller still shot himself in the foot by raising the price beyond what others would pay. The buyers aren't hurt by this.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
I see all kinds of accusatory posts which I would have to disagree with. I've been a long time eBay user and that's mostly as a seller (a silver powerseller for a chunk of it). Now I never participated in shill bidding and would even ban friends of mine from bidding on my auctions. Occasionally I'd shoot them a link to just show them what I had posted and they'd bid on it (usually to get it started) thinking they'd be doing me a favor. For example, if I was selling a $500 monitor they might have bid $40 or something. However, I want absolutely nothing to do with this and I will add their user IDs to be banned from bidding on my auctions the second I see this.
Why? Because I have seen/spoke with people that took part in shill bidding. This will include people that just did it every few auctions and were Gold Powersellers, with well over 1000 positive feedback. Guess what happened to them? Two different things - automatic account termination and/or warnings. I've seen a huge seller (makes $$ for eBay you know) have their account closed, no questions asked. This (AFAIK) was not as a result of a complaint either. We're not talking these retards that bid up the auction and then cancel once they see what the first place bidder's amount was.
Anyway, I would say eBay does a good deal to try and stop this practice. So I'd ask that some people not post unless they know what they're talking about. It seems like a lot of people are talking out of their asses. It can be difficult to catch everything on a site that busy. Why don't you just go solve the problem for them instead of posting useless bullshit here.
You are missing something, that sellers know very well. It's called human nature .
Once you bid on an item, you are emotionally invested. You think that you can walk away, but in reality, you will probably pay a little more than you originally planned.
I'll give you an example. Let's say you bid $50 for something that sells for $200 in stores. You are saying to yourself, cool, I've got a bargain. Shortly before the auction ends, someone ups your price. So now you have a choice. Do I go away, and look for another item (which might or might not be available), or do I bid $55 or $60. Most likely you will bid, and rationalize it to yourself that $60 is almost as good as $50, and hell, you still getting a bargain on a $200 item. In the end you might pay $90 or $100. You are still getting a bargain, right?
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Yes, but that only gets shills where you have another account that you use only for shilling.
That's not the only way shill bids happen -- it's just the most obvious. (Well, the second most obvious. The most obvious would be when the same account that's selling the item is bidding on the item -- but I'm guessing eBay's system prohibits that.)
Ultimately, shill bidding is difficult to detect (and even harder to prove) when done properly. But the evidence is that eBay doesn't really care, even when it's pretty obvious that it's shill bidding, especially when the offender sells a lot on eBay.
I hate snipers. I know that it's the "most effective method" for winning an auction. As usual, "I am so much more successful when I'm an asshole than when I'm a decent person." If you tried to snipe in a real auction, you'd just extend the auction.
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Why does eBay not do more to snuff it out? They MUST KNOW that certain items (e.g. memory sticks) are virtually all fraudulent. They MUST BE ABLE to tack warnings onto such sales. I suspect they don't care much because they get a slice of every transaction including whatever is left in the paypal account when they finally suspend it. Their loss adjusters probably know that only a small percentage of people will ever pursue for a refund, so why try so hard to do anything about the problem when they're making money from it.
If eBay are really serious about fraud, they should be doing more than pay lip service to fix the issue, which includes being more proactive when fraud is suspected or likely and providing more accessible tools so the buyers can highlight issues faster.
A friend of mine has been scammed twice. He was trying to purchase a new fancy phone. The first time he found a good deal but made the mistake of not focusing on the reviews from other buyers. He paid his dues but never received a product...Out 400 bucks.
Scam numer0 2 was a bit more shiesty. He purchased a phone from someone over sea's. This was about 600 bucks, the guy had great reviews and it seemed like a winner. After he placed his purchase a month passed...No phone. So he decided to contact the seller. The seller said he sent the package and he had it insured and would claim the insurance and resend another phone....Weeks later still nothing. One day my friend received a box. Hoping for his phone he noticed that the address on the box was totally butchered. A number here on the address was missing, part of the street name was gone. It looked like the sender did it on purpose. Upon opening the box were 2 apples....We never got a hold of the seller. This was the senders trick. He received payment on the phone and then intentionally butchering the address so he could then claim the insurance payout...for another 600 bucks. The seller came out way on top and was never found again.
This is one of many reasons I avoid Ebay.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
I primarily do buying from eBay, and although I can't attest to the actual inner workings, when attempting to bid on guitar/musical instrument items since they instituted this Bidder 1, Bidder 2, etc. hidden identity system, EVERY auction that had hidden bidder IDs resulted in a sale price that was in excess of the real value of the item being sold.
By this I mean an individual could go to an online or bricks-and-mortar retail store and buy the same item for the same price or less.
Imagine your wife's grandma's heirloom china set is worth $400 on the market, but priceless to her. You have recently dropped one plate, and it's irreplaceable. The plate is worth $80 on the market. 6 months later, you see the plate on Ebay, drawing insipid bidding, reflecting relatively low demand, stuck at $40. Your web design business has been doing well, and you can afford $200 to get back in grace with your wife. You therefore bid $200, raising the current bid to $42. On the final day, you see a series of bids in , all by the same person, raising the price to $160. This is the point at which the shiller did not dare to raise the bid for fear of outbidding you.
Effectively, he got free information about how much you are willing to bid. Information is money. It's like when you're bargaining on a used care--you start with your offer. You don't tell the salesman how much money you brought, and then start bargaining.
In the example above, you pay less than the item is worth TO YOU, but more than market, because the shiller was able to tease that info out of you.
Look at the distance selling act for the uk - if you bid on an item, but then choose not to buy it... well you just excercise your rights under the distance selling act - say you don't want it and dont pay. You can even ask for yout money back up to 7 days after the day it arrives - and unless their ts&cs have said otherwise its up to them to arrange to pick it up. (exceptions if its custom work)
No admittedly getting a refund is going to be hard work if they dont want to give it - but saying you wish to cancel your purchase - they could try to fight it in court but I doubt they would have a chance in hell of winning - especially since they can't even claim costs of the auctions as ebay offers them a refund of sellers fees and a free relisting if a buyer backs out (mutual withrawal agreement is the prefered way of doing this)
People will often say that the distance selling act (and the sale of goods act) don't apply to auctions... technically thats true, but both acts specify auctions with an auctionier (where the auctionier is assumed to be a human not a computer)
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Yeah, I've got scammed out of a 2800 dollar laptop once. Granted I was foolish and gullible, eBay and PayPal were only able to get $175 back, my bank however will probably be able to get Visa to issue a chargeback. It makes me sick that I see nearly the EXACT same auctions up for sale, and I see people bidding for it. I really wish I could say something to the people who are bidding on the auction, but now I can't.
It's not all peachie for the sellers either. Since there's been so much fraud from their end, eBay and Paypal are quick to take money away from them if they can't proove that the item was delivered. Buyers take advantage of this and set up disputes and claims even though they recieved the item as advertised. eBay and Paypal don't really care too much because as long as their making money, the few percent of people getting scammed doesn't really make difference.
It's really sad that so many people have to make money by hurting others. I think that's the root of the problem. Even if eBay takes the necessary action, there will be will other new ways to scam people.
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
The fixing auctions, with shill bidders on the other hand, isn't as bad in my book. Just don't pay more than you want to pay for it. This is the sellers way of saying they don't want to sell it for less. Getting "caught up" in an auction for a common item is just dumb.
Just stick to the fixed price items, or just set your bid once (at the price want to pay for it) for the item you want. If you're bidding multiple times on an item, you're caught up in the game and have a problem.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
ebay is a great place to find automobiles but admittedly you have to be careful and you have to be willing to get up off of your butt and go look at the car. I've bought two cars off of ebay and in both cases it took me a long time to find the vehicle I was looking for. When I did I was entirely comfortable paying that sellers "Buy it Now" price and in both cases I went to look at the car in person.
For basic transportation it's not necessarily the way to go. Chances are most people have at least as good a selection within driving distance of them at various dealerships in their area. If you want something a little out of the ordinary though it's a good place to find it.
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Won't work. This hidden Shill network has an agreement to rotate bidders. So Joe from Kentucky bids on Sara from San Frans pots and then next week Sara bids on Ken from Florida electronics. There has to be a way for this to be tracked of at least analyzed. I've experienced this behavior maybe 1 out of 4 times I bid on things. It's easy to spot when you have 7 exact model Cisco routers from different sellers and the one I bid on suddenly gets jacked to 7 bids while the others have no bids and end within 7 hours of each other. I watched the Cisco router auctions for about two weeks to see this in effect. But now that I think of it hiding the Ids does help out some. This requires the Shill network to coordinate more instead of just looking at the bidders and seeing that Sell4Ever4 is part of the Shill network and helping him out by jacking up the bid. I personally didn't bid when I saw a seller with a lot of feedback and a buyer/bidder with a great deal of feedback to. (How can a poor musician buy so many items when he's been eating Ramen noodles for the last 7 years. Doesn't make sense at all) Well now I can't examine the users feedback. I'm seriously cutting back on my Ebay bidding and going to online classifieds instead. Ads that say $XXX.XX or best offer are much more appealing because the seller can't play games with me.
Morality, filters both ways.
You could create auctions that end after your marks let the other bidders disperse, and then bid them all up after the target auction closes. Not cheap (with all of Ebay's fees, I suppose you could claim non-payment on your dummy accounts), but essentially the same shill sellers.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
How is sniping being an asshole? I'm under no obligation to fork over as much money as a seller is willing to take. Nor am I under any obligation to get into a bidding war with some fanatic to whom winning the auction (at any price) is more important than obtaining the item.
Sure ebay isn't a brick'n'mortar auction house, and it has a different set of rules. So what? In the real world, people don't always pay the asking price --- they are free to haggle in an attempt to bring the price down. Is that also being an asshole? That's the way the market works --- the seller wants to maximize the selling price, and the buyer wants to minimize it. You understand the framework. My advice: If you are a buyer intent on winning, put in a high bid, or snipe it yourself. If you are a seller, set a reserve price. If you don't like the game, don't play.
I've only bought a few things over the years, but I have received the infamous email stating the winning bidder didn't pay and they were now offering me the chance to purchase the item.
To make a long story short I was willing to pay $25 but got the email asking me to pay $30 because the high bidder didn't pay. I offered $20 (which was my bid until 23rd hour bid) which was rejected. The item was re-listed and the exact thing happened again. Again I offered $20 when I got the email, again it was rejected by the seller. Apparently the third time I was the 2nd highest bidder, the seller finally figured it was best just to accept my offer of $20 and stop losing money on re-listing.
You just have to be stubborn when you suspect you're getting played. If the item isn't highly sought after, eventually the seller will realize they will keep losing money by playing these games.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
I'm sure those that are making shill bids are somewhat skillfull, but I don't really think that shill bidding on an online auction is nearly as corrupt as shill bidding during a live in-person auction (except if multiple shills are used and any bids are withdrawn). It's quite obvious that if you take 2 shill accounts and bid up the price on an auction until the real bidder is outbidded, then retract the last shill bid, you've exposed the value of the real bidders maximum bid. If no bids are withdrawn, then the shill bids are essentially no different from the seller moving a reserve price upward. If shill bids raise the price on an object past the offers of the real bidders, the seller ends up with a winning shill bid, avoid making a sale that would lose him money (or perhaps losing a sale that would have made him money), but he ends up not selling the item except in ebay's eyes (and he has to pay fees to ebay for the sale). So, as long as ebay continues to show any bid retractions, I believe buyers are pretty fairly treated in any auction where there are no withdrawn bids.
The reason this is so different from a live auction, is that a shill in a live auction has a lot more information they can read from the bidder to determine how far they can push the bidder to pay more. Online, we're all given pretty much perfect poker faces and no other bidder can generally tell just how interested we are in the auction.
The other thing that probably makes shill bidding really tough (for maximizing the sell price rather than for raising the effective reserve price) is the use of sniping bids. I know I typically am attracted to auctions for items I want with as few bidder as possible. I know other bidders will just raise the amount I'll have to pay to win, so it's generally much better for me to put a snipe bid at the end of the auction for the maximum I would want to pay. Shill bidders can still raise the minimum the auction could sell for, but they get no chance to try to push my bid up (unless then can do this in about 3 seconds). All in all, I find ebay to work quite well, at least the way I use it.
Andrew
If you bid $200 you're saying "If this sells for $200 I'm ok with that." There is no earthly reason you can bid $200 then complain when you have to pay near that amount. A seller's contract is to sell the item for whatever it goes for. The bidder's is to pay up to what they bid....but there's no law saying you have to keep, or ever, bid on anything.
I agree that your analogy is accurate, but I don't think I made an analogy in the first place.
Let's stick with the radio and set up another hypothetical situation.
You bid $200, fake bidders send the price to $195, real bidder bids $196. Now what? The market price was set by a "real person" but they price may have never got that high without the fakes, although who's to say it wouldn't have?
People will avoid that. Although the "Buy it Now" is a similar good option and usually works if you are being reasonable.
A funny story... A month ago I sold a RAID controller and some other parts on ebay. I setup the auction with a $10 starting price, and a Buy-it-Now of $75, as that's what I thought the thing was worth and all i cared to get.
Usually when I do this, someone snags it with the Buy-it-Now, but this time someone bid instead, so the Buy-It-Now disappeared(as i had no reserve). Within a week there were 15 people watching the item, and a bidding war started.
I ended up selling it all for $160, which surprised me.
I only sell used stuff on ebay, things I don't otherwise have much use for. If I was trying to sell a PS3, things might be different. For me, I'm just happy that someone else can use the item and I recoup some value to buy new goodies with.
Some stuff is hardly worth selling. For instance I have decided i want to upgrade my home LAN to gigabit. Try selling a linksys 100baseT switch on ebay, you might get $5 if you're lucky.
If you want something on ebay and the going rate is $50 (and you know this to be true) but you put a bid of $100 on it then you're a fucking moron (in this purely hypothetical case of course)
This is not an issue at all if you don't fall for it and it's not too terribly difficult to not fall for it. Don't bid more than you're willing to pay. Don't bid far more than it's worth. Use that brain that the flying spaghetti monster gave you and bid on.
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Jesus that is a very scummy set of auctions. The worst part is that eBay could obviously tack big warnings to every auction in that category (with BLINK tags if necessary) indicating that the item in the picture is not what you're actually buying. Better yet, ban pictures from certain categories altogether.
A fraudulent bidder would try not to win a bid and if he did the good would get relisted later on (or the sale handed off to the second highest bidder).
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
ive been shill bidding on my own auctions for years.. ;-)
But in eBay no one's waiting around the corner to knife you and take it back...
What I've always enjoyed is how many sellers will screw you on the shipping if you're not careful. I've been following auctions for some PDA's etc for awhile, and you'll find shipping ranges anywhere from $15 to $90. This sucks when items are listed with the sale price (some include shipping now when possible) but sorting by price etc is still screwed up by the shipping overcharge.
I wonder what happens when you have an unlisted shipping price and the seller decides to tell you that it's $100 to ship a paperback novel or some such thing.
" If you set a reserve price of $5 you're saying "If this sells for $5 I'm ok with that." There is no earthly reason you can set a reserve price of $5 then complain when you have to sell it near that amount. A seller's contract is to sell the item for whatever it goes for. The bidder's is to pay up to what they bid....but there's no law saying you have to sell anything. "
Now do you see why people object to sellers falsely changing the auction terms?
Ok guys I know this has probably been said a hundred times already but why don't you really think about it. Why is this a big deal? You go on Ebay, you bid on something. You then win it or not, nobody is holding a gun to your head making you bid more till you get it. SO WHAT IF THE SELLER UPS THE PRICE YOU DON'T HAVE TO PAY IT. You only pay what you want for the item! It is ridiculous to even call this fraud and you should all grow up and think for yourselves.
1) Figure out what you are really willing to pay for that item. Period.
2) Set your snipe bid at that price.
3) If you change your mind beforehand, cancel your snipe.
Each processor would proceed sequentially as if it had been better for them not to rise against Saul.
Say an item is currently going for $10. I decide I'll pay up to $20 for it. Ebay will start my bid at $11. If nobody else bids on the auction, I win the item for $11. However, if the seller fake-bids it up to $18, I'll end up paying $18 for the item instead of $11. In that case, as far as I'm concerned, the seller cheated me out of $7. I may not realize it, but I was cheated none the less.
For one thing, eBay can stop creating new "security policies" that reduce users' accountability to one another. Shill bidders were given a leg up when eBay stopped allowing users to see the email addresses associated with user accounts; now they've been given the keys to the whole damned store.
Like other posters have noted, eBay makes the same listing fees from a fraudulent auction as they do from real ones.
No, you still got it 3$ to cheap, because you were willing to pay 20$. Your argument is a logical fallacy.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
I had a shill bidder push me up, then literally bid OVER my price, winning the bid themselves. And I stopped bidding. Then they RETRACTED their bid (which is supposed to already be suspicious) to make sure they didn't win.
I reported them to Ebay, back when the names showed, along with various evidence that the accounts were tied together. (The previous-name of one of them was real-name type username with the same last name as the real-name type username the other one was using... from the same city.)
I did not get my money back - although it was only $1, and it was still a reasonable deal on the item. And I wasn't willing to refuse to pay because I didn't want to screw up MY feedback, and I didn't have enough transactions to make it unimportant.
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The practice of shill bidding has been going on since forever, anytime anyone has ever sold anything for a negotiable price. One strategy is to place a phone call from a pub or café, ostensibly begging to borrow some money to purchase an item from a nearby antique shop or market stall which is claimed to be on offer at a price much lower than its true value (which is invariably mentioned, possibly along with the name of a potential purchaser) and about which the caller is clearly rather excited. Of course, the "caller" is part of the scam, in league with the seller; and fully expects to be overheard by someone, who then departs quietly and purchases the item (in reality worth very little and marked up) before the loan can be completed.
..... but only if buyers keep their cool and don't get auction fever.
Of course, the scam only works because of the eavesdropper's greed -- they get so carried away by the thrill of listening in on a private phone call and discovering a little secret that they weren't supposed to know about, that they totally forget that it might not even be for real. You can't con an honest person.
Just remember, fools and their money are soon parted. Treat eBay just the same as any other form of gambling, and never spend more than you would be prepared to lose. If the bidding goes above what you wish to pay, walk away. If the seller does win their own item back, they will still have to pay the listing fees, plus PayPal's cut, which can provide some measure of disincentive against shill bidding
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Sure it's easy enough to justify the action of sniping, just like paying some kid for his spot in line to get a playstation, but it's still an asshole move most often capitalized upon by people with less active lives that have time resources to snipe in whenever their auction of interest happens to be ending. I'm not sure if it's just laziness on the part of programmers at eBay, but I imagine they could gleam a better profit margin by emulating certain aspects of the time tested traditional auction format where bidding is extended upon attempted sniping.
The moral disconnect of the internet should not be overlooked here. By most standards the guy that sees a kid headed toward the last voltron toy in the store and then runs in front of him to grab it is an asshole. But many consider doing the same thing on the internet "fair game."
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You are not an asshole in anyway. I have made a lot of purchases on E-bay, and occassionally I've been sniped. So what, all that means is that I didn't set my max bid high enough or I was to busy to watch it at the last minute. If I really want the Item up for grabs I would indulge in a little sniping myself. Don't let these morons run you down. If you are good at sniping then you have my respect for being a skilled E-bay user. I'm sure you already know that those with lesser skills are always jealous. Have agreat day and snipe away. Good luck, Sincerely, Sabre
Here is a tip- when you want to buy something on ebay, don't bid for more than you want to pay for it. That way, you can't label yourself as a victim if someone, including the seller, bids higher than you. Your bid won't change unless you will it.
Here is another tip- eBay is too big to find steals. If you think you are buying that new XBox 360 for $200, then you are fooling yourself. You may be able to get it for less than you'd pay at target, but do yourself a favor and recognize that eBay is not a yardsale of the clueless. People know the cost of what they are selling. Stop considering yourself a victim if the reel you in and you pay too much because of your bidding addiction.
Sniping is an automated, not a manual process.
You're a sniper if you use an automated perl script or other program to bid on an item in the final minutes before an auction, up to your maximum.
UnWired buyer is NOT like this. It is no different from you checking on an item on your watch list in the final minutes and you manually typing in the bid. This is not sniping. Sniping is automated.
not only has the seller lost a sale as he got greedy, he's then got to pay ebay their cut of the sale (or embark upon reporting his alias for non-payment and enter the general hell that is ebay support)
sniping only works if the snipe comes in over the maximum the bid the current bidder has put in.
If you have the high bid of $100 bucks and the price is $100, then you're just asking for snipers to come in at $110.
If on the other hand you've put in a max bid of $110, then it doesn't really matter if 5 people all snipe in at $105 in the last 3 seconds - in fact if you'd all been bidding on the item normally and there were 6 people all thinking it was worth $105, then the chances are you'd end up paying more as you all bid against each other.
I closed my ebay account because of people increasing the price, go beyond my price (my max amount), let the other person(s) win, then find an email saying that if I wanted the item at my last tender price. Well go figure
They could change the way they define the auction. Rather than being the maximum you are willing to pay, change the amount you enter to actually be your bid (If you enter $10, you pay $10 if you win, even if the second bidder is $3). This would have the same effect as every auction having optimal shill-bidding. But at least it would be up-front and spelled out.
Illogical thinkers such as yourself shouldn't argue logical fallacies.
I smurf everything and everything I smurf is perfect.
I generally just use proxy bidding if I'm buying something with a single listing, and I don't worry about sniping. I put in what I'm willing to pay as my max bid, and if somebody bids a dollar more they're welcome to keep it. If you're getting sniped then you're not really putting in what you're willing to pay - since if you'd have bid a dollar more if you were present when being sniped then you were willing to pay more up-front.
That said, I would do some sniping myself in one particular situation. Imagine I want to buy some high-volume item - like a popular CD or video game or something. One listing is as good as the next within some parameters - so I have 47 listings to choose from. I only have a few choices:
1. Put in my genuine max bid on one listing. Next day I log in and find somebody outbid me by $20 on that listing (they might not even have been sniping), but an hour later in the middle of the night another identical listing sold for $10 less than my minimum. If I had bid on that item I'd have won and would have gotten it cheaper (maybe).
2. Put in my genuine max bid on all the listings. Next day I log in and find I'm the proud owner of 15 copies of the CD. Now I get to be a power seller.
3. Wait until each auction comes up and bid up to my max bid on each one until I get one. There is another name for this - it is called sniping. I get one item for what I was willing to pay, or none of them.
And you don't need to stay up late to snipe - just to run the right software. The only way to get rid of this (in my opinion very legitimate) use of sniping is to institute pooling of auctions of similar items. The problem is that items may very in quality - if I'm sniping I can flag 47 listings that I like and ignore 27 others that I don't like.
I think this is the main reason people snipe - otherwise they'd just put in a max bid and go away.
How to Avoid eBay Fraud.
Stop being lazy and do product research aka shop around. Whenever I shop on ebay, I search completed listings and bid no more then lowest price the item has sold for. Sellers can shill bid all they want, I am not an idiot.
And these sellers give eBay a bad rep. Hence Time's articles. This is why eBay is actively trying to stop it. Bad rep is bad for business.
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They just use it as advertisement for their product. Ebay as a general rule is MORE expensive than 'sale' products in a store.
Now, for individuals selling things, they rarely if ever do this. They care more about getting rid of something than getting the highest price.
Also for rare commodities, hard to find stuff, I might use ebay to find better search terms, then go looking for a real seller's non-ebay site.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
No.
In economics, there is a long established and useful concept called consumer surplus. It is based on the fact that some consumers value an item at much higher than the going rate, but that their number is small enough that it would not be in the seller's interest to sell a smaller quantity at a higher price.
For example, say that I am extremely hungry and have a class in 10 minutes. I might be willing to pay $5 for a slice of pizza at the cafeteria nearest to my classroom, due to reasons of both timing and hunger. However, since the cafeteria can't read people's minds, and because of various local trade laws and issues of practicality, they must charge the same price to everyone. Say that the optimal price based on average demand and the cost of supplying pizza, both in labor and materials, is $1.50. So I buy a slice for $1.50 and I am left with a consumer surplus of $3.50.
This example is to say that people often value an item above the market clearing price (or below it, in which case they don't buy), and that the fraud being committed is fraud, because it artificially inflates the market price with bids of buyers who do not intend to pay, and who are in collusion with the seller.
In our pizza example, if a store employee out of uniform had stood next to me and tried to outbid me on pizza, until my reservation price ($5) was reached, that would be fraud. When someone misrepresents themself in a commercial transaction, it is fraud. All the bidders are transactors in an auction, not just the winner.
This sig has not been evaluated by the FDA. It is not designed to diagnose, treat, prevent, or cure any disease.
You end up winning the auction for exactly $50. Is it because the other guy only wanted to spend $49.50 and you happen to have outbid him? No, it's because the shill bidder put in increasingly higher bids until they outbid you, then canceled the bid saying "oops, I put in the wrong amount". Or they keep the bid, default on the payment, and the seller will use eBay's "Second Chance" bid to allow you to pay for it at your previous bid (which was the $49 or whatever).
Indeed, I've experienced this before... But you missed a fine point:
When one gets the "second chance email", the price is set to the HIGHEST price they "bid" before the shill accidentally won. Let's say the current price is $15 and I place a bid for $39. Let's say the price rises to $16 (with me as the current winner).
A shiller can come in and bid $40, and accidentally win. However, the "second chance" email will be for the price of $39, NOT for my last actual bid which was $16.
I've seen this before where I and only one other person who mysteriously appeared 1 minute before the end of the auction and then defaulted on payment. Needless to say, I was pretty pissed that I was being given a second chance at a price that no-one else had even bidded near.
Yes, I might have been willing to pay $39 --- but in an auction, the price of an item doesn't hit "X" until more than one person is willing to pay "X-1". I resent being asked to pay "X-1" when the only other bidder was only willing to pay "X-15".
How do you know the bidder is trying to win though? How can you determine intent from the bids?
Jacking up prices by friends on ebay to increase profits is almost regular practice with anyone that sells more than three items a year. Fraud? not really though. In the most technical of terms, it is fraud if someone knowingly is bidding for any purpose other than to buy the item, but the only fraud that gets looked into is the kind that hurts the public consumer. This kind of fraud does NOT! Every buyer has a "willingness-to-pay" for any item. Suppose I want to buy a laser pointer for presentations, and I find that I'm willing to pay $35 for it. I can search online and find one for $15, so my economic profit is $20, but if I couldn't find one for any less than exactly $35, then there's no problem because that's what it's worth to me anyways. In ebay you will never be charged more than you choose to, so your economic profit should theoretically never drop below zero, as long as you make the correct decisions. I don't see how this is such an issue if nobody is particularly getting hurt...Economically speaking, this is flourishing because you are minimizing deadweight loss by matching willingness to pay with maximizing profit.
I Bleed Scarlet
I don't understand how that would help.
The auction would still be showing the highest bid, and the shill bidder wouldn't be paying anyway... so only difference here is that I'd not have a chance to pay less.
All you're doing is making it clear to people how stupid they may be?
When you sell an item on ebay you enter into a contractual arrangement. When you bid on an item on ebay you enter into a contractual agreement. Shill bidding is a violation of the contract. Period. It is fraud.
The parent poster my have been willing to pay $100 for the item but obviously would have preferred to have paid $50. Apparently there was no one else out there that wanted to pay more than $50 for the item. Under the TERMS OF THE CONTRACT the item should have sold for $50. However, the seller, by violating the contract and bidding on his own item gets more than the market would otherwise bear. Both the seller and the bidder are supposed to have some risk in an auction. There are ways for the seller to reduce the risk (reserve prices) but they may reduce the possible gains. That's how life works.
My question is, how does the buyer KNOW that the person who ran up the price was the seller and not another buyer? If the shill bidder used the actual login name of the seller then the bidder was under no obligation to pay. If it was a different login name then this person may just be complaining about the legitimate auction process.
Maybe this abuse could be prevented by requiring very secure user verification and by requiring a proof of transaction for every successful auction. If a pattern of successful bids that didn't result in completed transactions were found it would indicate this type of fraud. example: shillbidder1234 has bid on lots of auctions from fraudseller5678 and won several (by accidentally outbidding a real bidder) but no transaction has taken place... you have a case of shill bidding.
-- QED
This is exactly why the only items I get off eBay are get it now items that are a fair amount cheaper than I would be able to get in any store near me, or items that are at a fair price that aren't available anywhere else.
My sig beat up your sig.
Most comments here assume that ebay shoppers are or should be rational. The real problem is that (more than you think) buyers behave like addicts. It is similar to gambling addiction and closely related to shopping addiction. Why does a woman (Imelda) buy 3000 pairs of shoes??
So the question is: should society protect these addicts from people who prey on addicts. Should it be illegal to sell crack....dope....booze....antiques...shopping...?
You'll pay as much as you do with shill bidding, but you know up front about it. By making it clear that your highest bid is your only bid, there is no fraud.
A shiller doesn't beat your bid so you can't win the auction. A shiller keeps on bidding so your reserve is topped out. So instead of paying $15 for that tentacle rape DVD you covet so badly, you pay $35, what you put as your max. It's a way of fraudulently wringing out maximum profit.
A shiller is not interested in NOT making a sale. He wants to artifically squeeze maxiumum profit using eBay's bidding rules and mechanisms.
Right, that's the way real world auctions work. Ebay has different rules. I do believe back when ebay started and there was actually serious competition, there was another online auction house for which snipeing did not work. On that system, whenever a bid was placed, the auction was extended to last at least another 5 minutes. Thus, you couldn't snipe. Now, similar to an ebay auction it meant you might have to go to the site or read your email and rebid if desired. It also meant you didn't know how long you'd have to watch that auction before it would finish. In the end, we can see ebay didn't go that route. I think people found just bidding their maximum offer works just fine and haggling for an hour at the end of the auction wasn't worth everyone's time.
If you've bid the maximum amount you'd be willing to pay for an auction, the only thing a snipe bid denys you is the better deal you were hoping to get. If they bid earlier, you'd still not get that better deal. The sniping just let you hold onto the hope a bit longer. Why do I snipe? I don't want to deal with the people who don't bid their maximum amount, watch the auction for competition, get emotionally invested in winning the auction, and push up the price I have to pay. By sniping the auction for the amount I'm willing to pay, I win the auction for what I'm willing to pay, and don't if the auction goes higher. There are 2 useful differences between this and a standard bid:
1. People don't get to look at my bid and respond to it. Their bid of how much they're willing
to pay is the only response they get.
2. My bid is retractable up until the time of the auction. This means that I can bid on 10
auctions for identical (to me) items, and stop the other bids if i win an auction.
I find the 2nd benefit quite useful. Ebay doesn't offer anything like this ability. I often shop for items on ebay, find 10 perfectly reasonable auctions, but on ebay I can only bid on 1 auction at a time. Using a sniping system, I can bid on all and set it up to stop when it wins an auction.
Sniping isn't about being an irritant to anyone else. It's just more efficient. If ebay itself offered this bidding option, the seller would essentially get no feedback on his auction until the end, and there wouldn't be any bidding wars to raise the prices. There also wouldn't be any shill bidding, as a reserve bid would work just as well. In my opinion, using sniping bids makes you be diciplined about your bid. You must carefully decide what your maximum bid amount should be (but, you can also change that before the end of the auction, but you can change it up _or_ down). In my opinion, if you're not using the snipe bidding, you aren't shopping as efficiently and carfully as you could.
Andrew
I am a powerseller on ebay. I post 50-100 auctions daily on ebay. Even if I wanted I don't have the time to shil bid by auctions. It is totally impossible. This is done by the small seller that posts 1-2 auctions per week. Also ebay does check for shill bidding. if the same persons bids your items repeatedly he gets investigated.
I do not use the reserved price since it does no good according to my stats. I just put the items on the start price I can afford.
Very low start prices are only feasible on very popular items (e.g. ipods). On specialty items you can't do that, because even if you start your auction at 0, it will not get bids anyway. The people who want specialized items know their price and are willing to pay for that.
Ebay is still a buyer's market and more so since sellers are abundant and the supply overtakes demand anytime. So the low price start auctions tend to diminish. These can only be when the demand is balanced with supply so products get a decent price. Sniping further strengthens this phenomenon.
Ebay's commissions and pricing also drives prices up. Ebay has been screwing all sellers the last year. You can only price competitively when you sell popular items. If your items are art, or specialty it is easy to loose money selling on ebay. Look at how many sellers quit after a few months.
EBAY gets all the cash!!!!!!!! Believe me.
Hope to have been of help.
but it's still an asshole move most often capitalized upon by people with less active lives that have time resources to snipe in whenever their auction of interest happens to be ending.
Here:
http://www.jbidwatcher.com/
Now you too can snipe w/out having to sacrifice your active lifestyle.
Just configure it with the auction number to snipe - the amount you want to snipe - and go on with life.
First they burn books, then they burn people.
That was the last auction I have ever bid on an eBay auction without sniping.
eBay's proxy bidding system is prone to tampering by shills and idiots, making the system an economically infeasible to use in a couple of important ways. First, as noted in a previous article you are much less likely to win an auction if you don't snipe, wasting your time and effort. Secondly, adding insult to injury, you frequently will pay too much for the items that you do win. It is literally like tipping your hand in poker, allowing the other players to know your hand before having to place their bets. Whether the "idiots" are really stupid or just irrationally exuberant about the bidding process makes no difference, the net effect is that they act as unwitting shills for sellers. This is great for sellers and for eBay, but it's Not So Good for the buyer.
As an aside, when I am really keen to get a good buy on an item and I am willing to put a little time into the process in order to get a good price, I will use a feature on the sniping service I frequent called "Bid Groups." This is a system where I can schedule a (usually low-ball) bid on several very similar auctions and my sniping service will stop bidding after the first auction I win. Using this I usually lose five or six auctions in a row only to get a killer price on the one I win. As always, it's important to normalize the prices by taking into account shipping costs in the total price of each item because the $10 item with $20 shipping may not be a better deal than an identical item for $29 with $1 shipping, especially since sellers with sleazy, predatory shipping policies are best avoided.
Sure it's easy enough to justify the action of sniping, just like paying some kid for his spot in line to get a playstation, but it's still an asshole move most often capitalized upon by people with less active lives that have time resources to snipe in whenever their auction of interest happens to be ending. I'm not sure if it's just laziness on the part of programmers at eBay, but I imagine they could gleam a better profit margin by emulating certain aspects of the time tested traditional auction format where bidding is extended upon attempted sniping.
In an ideal world, sniping should have absolutely no effect on the outcome of an auction. It shouldn't matter whether you put your bid in one second after the auction opens or one second before the auction ends, the winner will always be the highest bidder, sniper or not. Unfortunately, eBay is infested with morons. These morons think that they need to bid the minimum each time, like they do in the auction houses they've seen in old sitcoms. When they see that they've been outbid, they bid another dollar, then another, and another... In the span of thirty seconds, they'll place a dozen bids or more, each just a dollar higher than the last, not stopping until they have the high bid (regardless of what the item is actually worth). Considering that you are supposed to bid the maximum you are willing to pay, this behavior makes no sense; if the price you are willing to pay fluctuates that quickly, you should be too stupid to use a computer (unfortunately, this never seems to be the case...).
This problem is easily avoided by not signaling your intent to bid on the item until it is too late for the morons to place more clueless bids. You aren't cheating anyone, you are just holding the morons to their initial bids. People only have a problem with sniping when they think "I would have been willing to pay that price." They'll keep thinking, "It's just another dollar..." even though the fact is, someone was willing to pay more; the high bid is all that matters. If you can't make up your damn mind, you shouldn't be bidding at all.
Snipers do nothing illegal, immoral, unfair, unkind, rude, or unexpected. They place bids, just like everyone else on eBay. Sometimes they win the item, sometimes they don't (and many times they will pass on bidding on an item entirely because the price in the last few seconds is higher than they are willing to pay). Sniping actually forces a handicap on the bidder; by sniping, the bidder has only one chance to place a bid, and even then only if there are no technical issues that prevent the bid from being placed in time.
As for the idea of extending auctions when late bids are placed, that's just idiotic. In most cases you have 5 or 7 days to place a bid. If you can't figure out what you are willing to pay in a week, what good will another 15 minutes do? All I can see is that you might get swept up in the heat of the moment and bid way too much, raising prices for other bidders and giving the sellers the pleasure of trying to collect money from people who are incapable of making decisions - and driving an increasing number of users to alternatives that don't play stupid games with the auction's end time.
I have a solution for all of you who whine about snipers. It is really simple, 100 percent effective, and completely free. Bid more than you are willing to pay. That's it. If you get outbid, it's no big deal, because you never wanted to pay that much in the first place. If you win at your high bid, you may have spent too much, but you get that joy of winning that you seem so concerned about. Best of all, it requires no changes to anything else, so it couldn't be easier to implement.
I have people come up and ask me about how to sell stuff on ebay all the time. They think because I know about computers that I should know about Ebay. They usualy have some stroy were they took some classes that was supposed to show the but the guy instructing it sold on Ebay so he wouldn't do much more then gloss over it.
I'm wondering if the mystery associated with being an Ebay king/queen is bidding on your own product. I'm also wondering if is more or less a scam were if the secrete actualy got out in a formal class situation if that class would be subject to violation of the laws and such. If bidding on your own product to drive the price up is illagal then I would asume anyone telling you to do so might be somewhat conspiring with you.
Any ways, I agree, Ebay sucks. I have never found anything on there for the price I am willing to pay that was actualy worth the price. Close to half the people I know who have bought from Ebay have regretted it in at least one purchase while a few more say they love it. But you might find that elswhere too.
Yeah, you went for Funny and you got it, but I really can't see the problem here, so please help me out.
I'm bidding on something and I get outbid, let's say the seller himself outbid me. I decide to go somewhere else. The seller is now stuck with the item and he still has to pay eBay their cut. He took a risk; it's a game and he lost. Or the buyer might decide to bid again if he feels that it's still a good deal.
What does it matter who bid before you? It doesn't. You look at the highest bid and then you ask yourself whether you'll pay more than that or not. It doesn't matter if there are 0 or 100 bids on the auction and if all bids are by different people or they're all by the seller. Just look at the highest bid, ask yourself whether you will bid or not, it's so simple.
I don't even see what fraud has to do with a seller bidding on his own auctions and I would hate to try to explain it to the police:
Me: "I think I got ripped off!"
Police officer: "OK, what happened?"
Me: "Well, I bought a shirt for $20 on eBay!"
Police officer: "Ah, and you never received it?"
Me: "Yes, I did!"
Police officer: "Ah, and the shirt turned out to be a knockoff?"
Me: "Nono, it's real, I'm very happy with it!"
Police officer: "So what happened?"
Me: "Well, I saw the shirt, it said $19 and that's cheap, so I bid $20 and won!"
Police officer: "So you saw something you liked, thought it was cheap and bought it. Where's the problem?"
Me: "Well, I suspect that someone else had bid on it before me, possibly even the seller!"
Police officer: "And this is a problem because...?"
And I would have NO idea what to say to that.
I realize it's very hard to catch people doing this if they take their precautions, but I don't even see what they're doing wrong. If someone wants to spend all his time outbidding his customers on his own auctions, thereby making no money and then paying eBay a percentage of every single non-existent sale, then I think we should just let him. I simply don't see what this has to do with fraud.
Sniping is an automated, not a manual process.
Just because you assert it is true doesn't mean it is!
Google definition
Wikipedia
Not that there's anything morally wrong with it. You're playing within the agreed rules, unlike fake bidders.
In my county, we have petitioned the authorities to put a blanket ban on the site.
So which of your countries is it? USA? Canada? The Netherlands?
Shill bidding is worse than simply getting ripped off. Shill bidding means that the seller - and associates - decided to create a fraudulent bidding environment. It is illegal and is prosecuted in real-world auctions. It ought to be on eBay as well. The first few people who have warrants served on them for this would send a good message.
Most sensible thing to do is wait until two or three minutes before the auction ends, then put in your bid.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Only pay what you can afford and what you think something is worth. If a seller out bids you on their own product. Fine, let them keep it.
And what if I bid $25 and no one else bids above $10? That means I'll win it at $10. Then, the seller at the last minute bids $20 on his own item. He sells it for $20. I get what I wanted, but the seller fraudulently obtained another $10 from me. It doesn't matter that I was willing to pay it. He lied (by claiming to be a "bidder" when he was the seller and supposedly not allowed to bid). His lie took money from my pocket. That makes it fraud. Or are you saying that I should be happy with fraud because I still got the item for $5 less than the maximum I was willing to pay?
Learn to love Alaska
Unfortunately, it would seem you left Econ 101 early, because the next part of that lesson describes the producer surplus and the social surplus. If the pizza place is looking to get $1/slice and can get $1.50, they have a producer surplus of $0.50. The social surplus (the benefit to all parties) is the sum of the two, $4. Now, let's say somehow you were made to pay $3 for the slice (the other pizza place closes so this one raises its price in response to the lack of competition). The seller was still willing to let it go for $1, so they now have a surplus of $2. You were willing to pay $5, and got it for $3, so a surplus of $2. Net surplus on your transaction was still $4. While there will be a net loss over all transactions (buyers willing to pay between $1.50 and $3 no longer buy pizza even though the transactions would produce a net social surplus), your particular transaction has not lost any net benefit; some of your benefit was simply transferred to the seller. On eBay in particular, where both parties in a transaction are usually private citizens, it is not even possible to demonize the seller as "big business" or some other perjorative unworthy of any surplus.
This is not to say that bidding up your own auctions isn't a crappy thing to do; basically the seller is trying to institute a reserve price without using the convenient feature provided for the purpose. Not being an eBay seller, I don't know if there is some sort of commission disincentive that causes people to resort to shilling rather than reserve prices, but seeing the amount of work involved and the danger of the shill account winning, there has to be some reason.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
"This is the sellers way of saying they don't want to sell it for less."
Last I checked, that's what the reserve price is for. Shill bidding is the seller's way of setting a reserve price while hiding that fact from the bidders. It's deceptive at best.
Ebay is an AUCTION SITE, not a retail marketplace. If a seller isn't willing to sell for the market value, he needs to find a different sales format.
Bufford went on down to Spring City last Saturday night to see what was selling at the Hinker Boys' Auction. Well, they had a parrot there that a rich lady was selling, and Bufford kindly took a likin' to the critter. When the auctioneer brought the bird around for bidding, Bufford asked him, "Charlie, kin that parrot really talk?"
Charley Hinker, the head of the auction house, assured Bufford it could talk and furthermore, it was real smart.
Bufford made up his mind to buy it, pulling all $2,000 out of his savings account just in case. Well, the bidding commenced, and Bufford jumped right in and stayed at it all the way. Several folks were bidding, but when the bids hit about $800, it settled down to a real mean contest between Bufford and someone at the front of the room. Bufford finally won the bid at $1,900 even, though he looked a bit pained as he walked to the auction office to pay for the thing.
When he got ready to pay, Bufford again asked the auctioneer, "Are you sure that parrot kin really talk, Charlie?"
Charlie said, "Bufford, I know that parrot kin talk real well, seein' how it was the parrot that was the one bidding against you."
----------------------
I heard this joke, or a variation of it, over a decade ago, now googled and found it here.
Sniping is the fault of ebay. They should do what real auctions do, extend the bidding. If ebay extended the bidding by 5 minutes past the last bid, then sniping would be gone. If someone had a problem with auctions lasting longer than they should, it could be set up to have the minimum step be 10x the regular step after 30 minutes of extended bidding. I don't know why ebay hasn't fixed it. I would think the sellers (the ones that pay them money) would like to have sniping done away with because it should result in higher bids.
Learn to love Alaska
There are two types of shill bidders on eBay:
a) The dumb ones
b) The ones that made a mistake and their house of cards falls down.
The dumb ones, are usually friends family and coworkers. They make a really dumb mistake, eBay sees it, WHAM. Suspended. These are also the hardest to identify, even without the anonymous system since it's mostly information eBay can see and you can't.
Now on the flip side
The smart ones, as in the article only need to make one mistake and everyone comes tumbling down. They are in fact the easiest to identify with the anonymous system since the 'view' link beside tells you all the information you need to know, and you can give that information to eBay.
If you want to see a shill auction/bidders taken down quick:
Report it to eBay after the auction ends, but before you pay (if you were bidding on it)
Report any second chance offer (this is damning evidence), send the headers of the email too.
Report any transaction interferance (emails about the auction coming from someone other than the seller), as this is also damning evidence or a stupid nigerian, send the headers of the email.
Be really bloody observant and note down suspicious behavior, like sellers selling mens clothing, but buying womens clothing only from the one seller.
Private feedback, this follows the "if you got something to hide..." reasoning
Any feedback or lack thereof and when.
"New" Bidders on high value items, hell even "new" sellers with high value items being sold for 1$.
Most importantly, wether you bid on the auction, who you suspect, and which auction and seller. eBay will likely not want to investigate someone just because you think a seller is shill bidding. That is no better than telling the police that someone smokes pot and saying "it was the white guy and the other white guy"
Also take note of when you send the report. If they have a lot of work, you might not get a reply for a while, in the mean time keep watching that sellers auctions if you want to see if it gets taken down. Sometimes there might not be enough reason to take down someone, but if you continue to see the pattern for a few more days, there might actually be enough evidence a few days later.
Also, if you are guilty of shill bidding, don't report it, and don't complain when any other shit happens to you. That's like going to the cops to talk about your stolen drug stash. I repeat, If you are breaking the rules, STOP.
If you get suspended for shill bidding, the worst thing you can do is lie about it too. If you get pulled over for speeding and you admit to it, you might get a warning, but if you show boobs and play dumb, the cop will likely give you a ticket for as much as possible. If you appeal a shill bid suspension, then just admit the wrongdoing and don't do it again and you might avoid them finding another reason to suspend you.
Spacezilla, seller can always pull the item if no one bids above him/her. S/he doesn't have to pay anything. I've seen the exact same items on eBay up for bid time and time again. And these are not items which have "reserve" bottom line bids.
Don't bid more than you want to pay for the item. I get what you are saying, but the way I look at it, you look at a deal on ebay and say "neato, worth $X dollars to me." You then bid $X and only $X. If you lose, so be it. Putting a higher upper cap is just inviting people raise the stakes, especially since it's automatic in many cases.
At most, I'd re-bid manually only after evaluating the case.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
...doesn't mean you should. Something called getting a good price. Shilling destroys that.
The problem with fixing auctions is that it is no longer an auction. Adn Ebay has the ability to set a minimum bid for those who want at least a certain amount for the item.
So a seller doesn't use the minimum bid probably because ebay want more of the sale or because he knows he can get more money out of some one who actualy thinks he is in an auction. In the later, he bids up the price makeing it look like there is interest in the item by someone else. This is violating the basics of a contract for sale. If the buyer set out in a process and that process is changed on them, then that is defruading the buyer.
Imagine If you will, I have to widgets for sale and place an ad in the paper. Yourespond with them and I agree to sell themto you. Then I come out and claim someone has offered more money then your payig so if you want it, you better fork some more money over. You think about it and decide to pay up, then I made the same claim again. Now what has happend here is the I have defrauded you in at least two way at least three times. First I offer the widgets for sale for a price, not a price or best offer, second, there is no other person, you ar the only one responding to the add. You could probable press the issue in court and force me to sell the item as listed. I could probably goto jail or pay a fine for the bait and switching I am trying to do. Depending on where you live there are several consumer preditor laws that protect you on this.
So in an auction that is rigged, you are not getting what was advertise and i'm sure something could be done about it. Now i don't do Ebay but someone who was effected by this could likley have legal recoures.
I use ebay sometimes, usually to buy name brand clothing that may or may not be authentic (but usually is) for anywhere from 15-50% of what I would pay for it in a store. I am quite paranoid about who's auctions I will bid on. In fact if someone has a feedback rating under 99% (literally) I will almost dismiss them out of hand. If someone has a 95% positive rating, that still means that 1 out of every 20 people they do business with felt fucked over somehow.
Another thing to consider, and it applies to a LOT more than buying something off of ebay, is that when I decice I want to buy something, I'll set a firm maximum price that I'm willing to pay for it. Before Christmas I wanted a digital camera to replace my old cheap one that got stolen. I decided that I'd look on ebay, and see if I could pick up a decent 5-6MP camera and I told myself I would not pay more tha $70 (plus shipping) for it. Anyway, every camera put up before Christmas went for at least double that much, in fact most of them wound up selling for well over retail. I'm not impulsive in that way so I didn't feel burned like all those other bidders. I waited until the first week of January and I now have a really nice camera, for a price that even a booster probably wouldn't match.
The point being, you are behaving impulsively and stupidly any time you get caught up in a bidding war. You are in a situation where you don't have control, and its time to back out and wait for something else to come along.
I used to like to snipe too, but eventually I realized its a pointless exercise. Now I just enter the maximum amount I want to bid, and forget about the auction until its over. If someone outbids me, oh well.
Every company has to do the same thing: Keep their paying customers happy and returning.
He/she is *really* saying "Sorry pal! I'm not letting go of this $200 radio for only $5.00!" Fair enough.
No, it's not fair enough. If the seller wanted a floor, they should have entered a reserve or set the minimum bid. To claim they are willing to sell it at $1 and then not selling if for that amount is fraud. The *only* fair thing for the seller to do is to close the auction and claim the item is no longer for sale. They can then relist it with appropriate measures to protect a minimum sale price. I do not think that is very fair either, but it is better than the fraud perpretrated by the shill bidders. If my bid reminds me that I'm entering a legal contract to buy the item, what about the sellers contract to sell it? He can break his side any time he wants with shil bidding, but I'm not allowed to break my side? That means that the contract is no longer valid. A contract where one side gives up rights and receives nothing in return is not a contract.
Learn to love Alaska
DO NOT CLICK ON HIS LINK!
it contains a REFERRAL SPAM CODE.
Please moderate this SPAMMER down!
News Flash!!
Nice guys finish last.
Nice guys then whine about it.
On the point of why this fraud is more profitable than a reserve price, is that you can prompt bidding on an item with limited interest far beyond what the market clearing price would be. If my reservation price is $500, and your reserve is $300, and no other buyers are interested, I get it for $300. If other (fake) buyers bid against me, you might fraudulently raise the price above and beyond your reserve, pushing me close to $500. Fake bidding allows you to act as a discriminating monopolist, charging up to the reserve price of the highest buyer on each unit. Monopolist is key here though, as if your good is fungible, people can just move on to the next auction and leave you to buy your own stuff. And of course, you end up with the unhappy deadweight loss associated with monopoly. The guy in the Times article is at least partly a monopolist in that he is dealing in antiquities, which are, well, rare. Though his might be fake. You own the only remaining print of that Van Gogh? Congratulations, you're a monopolist!
This sig has not been evaluated by the FDA. It is not designed to diagnose, treat, prevent, or cure any disease.
You, sir, are an imbecile. The kid who's headed towards the last Voltron toy (really... Voltron? Helloooooo 1985...) has a "right" to it, societally speaking. No one has a "right" to purchase something at eBay for MORE than they bid. If you want a CD and bid $15 and someone snipes you at $16, why are you upset? If you were willing to pay $17, that should have been your initial bid. Why is this simple fact so hard for you morons to understand?
If you bid $200 you're saying "If this sells for $200 I'm ok with that." There is no earthly reason you can bid $200 then complain when you have to pay near that amount.
So, if the high bid is $5, I bid $200, and then the seller shill bids $195 on the item, I should not be upset that I paid $190 more than if the seller hadn't violated the contract? The seller fraudulently separated me from $190. If it were legitimately bid up to that point, I shouldn't mind. I should be happy I got it. However, if the bid is driven there by bidding by an ineligible bidder concealing his identity to fraudulently bid, shouldn't that annoy me? Or do you like it when you are defrauded?
Learn to love Alaska
More and more, it seems like you have to be some sort of highly experienced expert to buy on ebay, and not get ripped off.
It takes forever to carefully check for all the tricks, check the shipping costs, reject the reserve not met, bidding against bots, being at your PC the instant the auction ends, watching out for *serious* scammers, protecting your ID. And on, and on, and on. New scams start all the time.
Are the final prices, including s/h and all, really *that* great? I mean, what is your time worth? And what about all the risks?
I kinda like the craigslist system. Local people just trying to get some money for stuff they want to get rid off. I don't have to be a total pro to find bargins that way.
Find a good sniping site. If you find a good site lots of times they will allow contingencies (if you don't win on one auction, bid on the next, etc). Bid low but reasonable on many auctions for the same time and forget about it until you get the email saying you won or lost. Another useful tip is to search for buy-it-now auctions that are in your price range.
The only real issue with ebay is you have to watch out for the jerks that jack up the shipping and handling and sell low.
Ok, but the idea that a seller is "willing to sell an item at $1" because they started the auction at that price is questionable from the get-go. eBay even suggests/recommends to new subscribers that they try listing their auction items at very low starting bids, like 1 cent or 99 cents, because it tends to generate more bidding/interest.
I think most sellers aren't really thinking "I'd be fine with it if I only got $1.00 for this brand new laptop." or whatever the item is. They're simply counting on eBay to live up to their promise of being the world's largest marketplace, and the fact that anyone with common sense would buy their item for more than such a small price.
If it becomes apparent that the system is failing them, and nobody is bidding anything remotely reasonable on their item after they let it sit out there for 5 or 7 days, they might resort to shill bidding as a last-minute safeguard.
The *buyer* really has nothing at risk, by comparison. (Remember, it's the *seller* who had to pay money for the initial listing, and will pay a percentage of the sale price on top of that if/when the item sells.) The only 2 outcomes a buyer is going to have are; 1. He/she wins the auction, getting the item for the price he/she stated he/she would pay, or 2. He/she loses the auction. The seller is still legally obligated to sell the item after the auction ends, for whatever price it ends up at. Shill bidding or not, nothing changes in that regard.
Well, I am not surprised at all about this. It really is logical that sellers (who can be bidders) would do that.
Just like in a real life auction, one can ask a friend or collaborator to bid when he/she sees that some bidders in the audience seem pretty fired up to buy the item. Then, how can one possibly tell? Recording IP Addresses? LOL!!!
All you'd have to do is use a buddy's PC to register and bid. Or even simpler, use a public proxy in Brazil or South Africa to do that. I guess the media is learning a bit more about computers, and they made a story about such phenomena. If you are reading this, I'm sorry to have waisted your time.
Personally, I bid on the last 15-20 seconds if I wish to buy it. There's no need for all the silly bidding game they play.
In several items, I have been overbid in a matter of 2-3 minutes. Who on earth is possibly looking at the same item when there
are 20 of the same kind and price range coming up?
I don't think Ebay can really do much about this.
That's my sentiment exactly. You want something? Decide what it's really, truly worth to you, bid that, and walk away ... either you win or you don't. If you don't, it wasn't worth it. Period.
:-D
Personally, I'm curious where you go as an alternative? I was looking for an "as-new" Tungsten T3 (which is out of stock) or a new-ish Psion Series5 (which they stopped making almost a decade ago). Where could I find that without investing a month' time browsing forums, and perhaps end up getting had anyway?
Ebay may be rotten, but at least it's organized. You can't argue that, can you?
"Good news, everyone!"
No, because she buys clothes. She completes the transaction, she hands over the money, the seller pays their amount to ebay.
If they only bid, and never actually complete a transaction, then they are suspicious.
No shiller is going to buy thing of themselves, if the transaction goes through, they will get out of paying it.
You only need to make it harder for them, they are not making huge piles of cash here. They are more being annoying.
Trying something is better that nothing.
I am beginning to think that maybe their are shill bidders on slashdot, how else do you explain getting to 5??
Then you really hate guys like me that have sniping software that nails it in the last 10 seconds.
:-)
I refuse to bid on ebay any other way, way too many morons on ebay get cought up in th ebidding and happily bit an item way past new retail prices.
so if I am a flaming asshole to you because I use automated sniping software (and it works fantastic BTW) then I am happy to be that
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I find it bizarre that people have such a hard time with Ebay. I've spent tens of thousands on Ebay (typically engine parts and camera gear) and never once have I've been burnt. It's not because I'm overly skilled in reading people or anything, I think a lot of people let themselves get excited over the item and get target fixation. It's common to see items get bid to death and go way over market value. Also it takes fuck all effort to just scrutinize the seller a little, the wankers are pretty easy to sort out from the pros. In private sales does the seller offer for people to come around and view the item? If so then go and have a look or send a friend. You can actually pay someone to go have a look.
But you are right, plenty of idiots get hammered by places like this because they can't/won't get their act together and think for a change.
And no, I couldn't give a shit what my karma is.
Shill bidding is pretty easy to detect if they try not to pay ebay the fee by ending the auction early. If they do that often enough they'll have a problem as ebay is pretty ruthless about collecting their money. If they pay ebay the fee then shill bidding is self limiting.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
For common items, you don't actually have to snipe. You just bid on the next auction to come due. I suspect that a lot of things that appear to be sniping are really just people bidding on the thing at the top of the list.
The things lower on the list may appear to have lower prices, but they'll be bid up, too, when they hit the top of the list, plus you have to wait if you find out if you won. Just do what everybody else does, and it'll have most of the same effects as concerted sniping.
Let's compare this to a traditional auction shall we?
The auction starts, the Auctioneer starts the bidding at $1 dollar. In short order the Auctioneer is calling out bids and people are making them. Before too long the Auctioneer is saying, "do I hear $10?" Sure enough, to the chagrin of a few in the bidding, someone bids $10. At this point the Auctioneer asks the room, "do I hear $11?" There is some murmurings amongst those assembled, and one gentleman appears ready to take the $11 dollar plunge. You however are convinced that the bidding will go ever upward, and you really want to win, so you decide to cut to the chase. You jump to your feet and state in a loud commanding voice, "I bid $20!" The room is momentarily stunned, then the Auctioneer calming states as his imploring gazes scans the crowd now drawn by your outburst, "going once, twice, sold to the man with the dirty raincoat."
Now, will the auction house expect you to only pay $10 because that's what everyone else offered? No, they won't. You bid what you bid. Your bid is a promise to pay. If you think that now what you bid is too high and begin to shout, "FRAUD!" I'm certain the staff of the auction house will think this a rather unwise thing. Not to mention think you a fool.
How is placing a maximum ebay bid different from this? Guess what it isn't. That's what you bid, and that's what the bidding went to. In fact, ebay is rather less harsh given the above scenario. If the bidding on ebay was at $10 and you bid $20, it would only up the bid to $11 and then bid for you should the price go higher. Damn nice of them don't you think? Having sold a few things on ebay myself, not many, I can guarantee that there is no way for the seller to see what you the bidder set as your max bid. So I fail to see why you are complaining. Auctions are not retail.
Say bad words about my book, in cold oatmeal, or I shall sue!
That is the most useless post I've seen in a long time. We are all dumber now for having read it.
You're a sucker for not buying from eBay. That's how I purchase nearly all of my electronics and I typically pay 30% to 60% less than the retail price. Sure, some of the gear is either second-hand or refurbished, but I'm saving a ton of money.
The people that complain about sniping are the ones that don't understand how bidding by proxy works. Rather than entering their maximum bid like they should, these people put in an amount less than their max, then see if anyone raises them, then they raise their price, etc. If they're going to try to win auctions this way, then they deserve to be sniped.
The only serious gear I have is computers and I don't mind paying retail because the shop I use gives me good service deals and even tradeins to upgrade stuff below retail cost (it helps that I've been shopping there for years and even when I moved out of town for a bit I kept using them).
Sure I might save 30% by buying from a stranger on Ebay, but will they fix/replace the widget when it breaks in a month? I know my retailer will.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
And I would have NO idea what to say to that.
:)
Just say, "He was a black guy!" They'll be all over that.
The discussion of this topic seems to break down into 2 kinds of statements: (1) the use of shills is fraud; and (2) just don't bid too much and you won't get defrauded. The chasm between these views relates to what you think an auction is all about and whether you get that experience when buying stuff through eBay.
Suppose you go to eBay to buy a particular kind of item that already has a clearly established value through an already existing, active market. You can safely bid the "right" amount and get the item at that price. If you don't, it's because some fool bid up that lot unreasonably. Not to worry, there's an active market, you'll get the next one.
But suppose you go to eBay expecting an actual auction. That's where the value of the item is uncertain. This could be for any number of reasons; perhaps the item is, in some sense, unique. Neither you nor the seller knows the "right" price. You can't depend on the existing market to tell you the "right" price for the item; this auction IS the market that will establish the "right" price. It's here that the laws of auctions come into play to create a level playing field between buyers and sellers by, among other things, making it illegal for a seller to bid on his own goods and also making it illegal for buyers to collude so as to avoid bidding up items against each other. It is in such an auction, when properly policed, that buyers can safely give to the auctioneer a maximum bid that represents the buyer's actual breakeven price for the item and the seller can safely put in a reserve that at least covers his minimum necessary return. The auction is trusted to do the rest.
Unfortunately, eBay doesn't provide that experience. A seller's shill can enter an auction without providing any meaningful credentials, bid up an item freely, and, if necessary, retract a bid that passes above the limit set by a real bidder. This tilts the playing field strongly in favor of the seller, making it impossible for the buyer to trust the auction to establish the market value for anything other than well know, heavily traded commodities.
the eBay system is broken, and that's what I thought when I first heard of it. It just encourages this kind of behaviour, although there's nothing really wrong with sniping. People that say "just put in the price you're willing to pay" are absolutely right, but the best time to put in your bid is simply at the end of the auction. That way you can avoid bidding wars and the far more evil tactic of shilling. To me, it just seems stupid to put in a bid at any other time. I have no idea what the other person has bid, unless I keep raising my bid until I'm the to bidder, and if I do win I only pay like fifty cents more than the other guy was willing to pay. That's just stupid. Shilling on the other hand abuses people's willingness to bid, and creates a totally false impression of demand. That's illegal everywhere else, why not on eBay? Think about this: you want to buy a house that's for sale, and you tell the guy your price. He agrees, and decides to do the deeds next week. You really like the house, and have talked to him about how perfect it will be for you. A few days later, he gives you a phone call and says another buyer is willing to pay 50 000 more, and you only have a few days to decide. Of course this other guy doesn't exist, and when you ask the owner for his number, he gives you the number of a friend, who's in on the game too.
Sure it's easy enough to justify the action of sniping, just like paying some kid for his spot in line to get a playstation
Yes it is, because neither is wrong. In the latter case, both the buyer and the kid are better off as a result of the exchange, and nobody else is affected. In the former case, if a sniper beats you, then he either bid more than you were willing to pay in which case you wouldn't have gotten the item if he bid normally, or he bid less than you were willing to pay, in which case why didn't you bid that much in the first place?
By most standards the guy that sees a kid headed toward the last voltron toy in the store and then runs in front of him to grab it is an asshole.
Yes, he is. But that has no relevance to either of the above scenarios.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
The market works by supply and demand, not by the "how much are you willing to pay" crap eBay keeps spluttering out. By creating a false impression of demand, the bidder is deceived into thinking he has to compete with other people. It's fraud every sense of the word, and it's probably illegal in most countries.
If the seller doesn't want the bids to be too low, that's what the "starting price" is for.
How is placing a maximum ebay bid different from this? Guess what it isn't. That's what you bid, and that's what the bidding went to. In fact, ebay is rather less harsh given the above scenario. If the bidding on ebay was at $10 and you bid $20, it would only up the bid to $11 and then bid for you should the price go higher.
You are confusing eBay's automatic proxy bidding with an actual bid. If you want to talk analogies with real auctions, consider the brokers that attend and bid for their clients. When a client tells their agent "I'll go up to $200 for xxxx", they don't expect their agent to open bidding at $200. What is happening on eBay is a perversion of the automated proxy bidding. And while sniping has bad connotations with some people, it's the only way for eBay buyers to battle shill bidding if eBay won't enforce their own rules.
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. -- Harry Truman
I agree with your sentiment... but isn't this article a complete waste of time?
Checking out a shill bid is as easy as 1 2 3 (4).
1. Sign in with your alternitive, bad karma ebay account.
2. bid $100,000 for the item you want to see what the real reserve is
3. Look at the size of the current bid, it'll be the shill + one increment.
4. Withdraw your $100,000 bid
Don't get mad, get even. People are shill bidding just as much to avoid eBay's reserve fees... You'd think eBay would care about that...
I see many people making the point that you shouldn't bid more than you are willing to pay. However, they seem to miss the point that a "Reasonable Bidder" is still being damaged by shill bidding and that Reasonable Buyers are entitled to rely on the price signals sent by a fair market transaction.
Say I see an item that I like. I am willing to pay $50 for that item. It also appears that I happen to be the only person interested in this particular limited edition Dr. Who tea set and so it is currently listed for $3. Willing to pay up to $50 for this treasured collectors item, I bid $50 and walk away.
For some unknown reason, nobody appears to want my tea set. So the high bid remains at $3. Then a shill (perhaps The Master, perhaps just the seller) comes and bids $20. Of course, my bid is still higher and the price now sits at $21.
No other bidding takes place. The shill directly cheated me out of $18. Auctions are designed to be a fair mechanism for determining the market price of a particular item. In this case, the Tea Sets actual market value was $3. However, because the market was rigged, the price increased to $21.
This is cheating, plain and simple, and results in a distortion of the mechanics of the market. Not acceptable.
My second point is this:
Market auctions are largely about price signals. (This is also why people who say "don't get in a bidding war" are not correct.) When evaluating the fair market price of a good, the rational buyer evaluates the intrinsic worth of the item based on evidence of that item's fair market value. One excellent source of data on the fair market value of an item is look at what others are willing to pay for that item. (This is particularly true for non-fungible items like my limited edition Dr. Who tea set. There is no defined maximum price like there is for a fungible good that can be bought at Target.) It is REASONABLE for me to consider the bidding patterns of other people in determining a fair market value for an item.
For instance, is that Picasso worth its auction estimate of $10 million or is it worth the $100 million it actually sells for at a fairly run auction? Before the auction, people would have said $10 million. However, after witnessing the evidence that it is indeed worth more than $10 million, they changed their assumptions accordingly. Bidders who get involved in a bidding war because the market signal they are receiving indicates that the price they assumed was reasonable after placing their first bid is no longer a reasonable estimate of the item's market value.
While not entirely analogous, this is similar to the market techniques used by Enron to perpetuate the California Energy crisis. They used shill bidding to artificially raise the market price for electricity (or in some case for natural gas, which led to increases in electricity prices). In electricity markets, the "up to bid" is essentially infinite. No matter what the cost of the electricity, the utility still has to purchase sufficient supplies to meet demand. (Hence why PG&E declared bankruptcy after being forced to buy electricity at inflated prices.) Shill bidding raises the price beyond what the fair market value of the commodity (in this case electricity) actually is, and the utility still has no choice but to purchase the electricity at the new inflated prices.
According to the logic employed by several of the other threads, nobody was harmed by this transaction since PG&E was willing to purchase the electricity whatever the price. Of course, that's a gross simplification and explains why energy markets are far more tightly regulated -- at least in theory -- than Ebay. But the principle is the same.
In sum: rigged markets harm even willing buyers by sending untrue price signals and distorting the true market value of a given item. End of story. Ebay must clean its own house to restore a fair market balance.
It's High time ebay was taxed out of existance with absolute and total aggression
FTA: "Auctions, which last several days, often begin at £1 and a seller cannot withdraw their goods in the last 12 hours when the bidding usually hots up."
Because you don't understand how it's wrong, doesn't mean it's not wrong. I see a lot of people posting that seem to say "geez, it's sleazy, but what's wrong with it?" And I shall attempt to explain. I'm not a teacher, but I will try to explain the concept in a way that makes sense.
See, the whole concept of auctions is that the item's owner is agreeing to sell the item to the highest bidder in an auction. He sets a minimum price for his item and then it's supposed to be up to the market.
Ebay's incremental bidding policy is supposed to ensure that you do not pay more than you are willing to pay BUT that you will NOT pay more than a tiny increment more than the next higher bidder's maximum price. Ebay has instituted protections like reserve prices ("I will not sell it for less than that...") and Buy It Now prices, for the auctioneer's benefit, but those protections come at a price which some people don't want to pay because it eats into their profits.
Many people seem to think that shill bidding simply results in the low bidder being outbid and the auction lister being forced to suck up the cost. That is not necessarily the truth. Sure, in some cases it is, generally when the minimum bid is just SO low and the bidder places a maximum bid comparatively low as well. If the deal really is too good, they're out nothing. If someone outbids them, they're out nothing.
Example A: If I see an item with a minimum bid of $1, and I know the item sells in the stores for $10, I place a bid for $5. For whatever reasons, I decide that if I have to pay $6 or more, I might as well purchase it in the store without waiting for the post office. Seller knows that the item goes for $10, is not interested in selling for less than $10 and only listed the item as $1 to avoid paying the increased listing fees for items with a starting bid over $1. His response is, using a new ebay account, pretending to be someone else (because by definition, adopting another identity is in fact pretending to be someone else) to bid the item up to $10.
The result in Ex. A is that seller now pays the low listing price for his $1, plus a theoretical commission of some percent (I don't remember what it is offhand and haven't used ebay in some time.) In practice, what happens is the seller uses other Ebay protections, instituted to protect sellers from fraudulent bidders, to cancel auctions at the last minute, refuse bids and such.
Obviously, Ebay's intention was not to give shill bidders a way of driving up their prices and then backing out if they don't like the results because they have tools, which they profit from when used, to allow sellers minimum prices.
Further compounding this is that Ebay then offers the option of re-listing the item for free, while not charging their typical end of auction fees because the fraudulent sale never went through. So the seller lists an item, agreeing to sell it to the highest bidder, provided that bidder is above any reserve or minimum bids. The buyer agrees to buy the item, at the lowest price above the next highest bidder. The seller does NOT pay a fraction of the inflated bid price. The seller does not pay to relist the item. The seller does not pay Ebay's fees for minimum prices, which the seller has, in practice, set.
Anyway, as I was saying, the relist situation is not the major problem with shill bidding.
Example 2: Seller lists the item at $1. He has no intention of letting the item go for less than $10 because that's what it sells for in stores. The Buyer bids a maximum price of $10 because, as an absolute maximum, that is what he will pay elsewhere. The Seller then steps in and bids 9.50, the result drives up the next minimum bid to $10, the amount he is willing to let the item go for. The buyer pays $10, the maximum he was willing to pay and often walks away unaware of any shill bidding.
Here is where some people seem to have trouble... Buyer is not agreeing to buy the item at $10. He is agreeing to pay the lowest amount over
If I couldn't trust the auction mechanism, I wouldn't buy things on ebay. I would buy them in shops or e-shops. The only incentive to use ebay, apart from the negative/neutral ratings (EbayNegs) that can give you an impression about the seller, is the auction system which if used according to the rules, can be an effective way to establish a fair market price for an item. If I couldn't trust that mechanism I would stop buying on ebay, because I have no way of knowing for how much(little) money I can get an item (as prices in shops are mostly too high). The price I'm ready to pay isn't a fixed quantity, it depends on the market: if I could decide freely how much I want to pay for an item, of course I'd want it for free. If the "market" I see is a fabrication, the whole bidding system becomes useless to me.
I still use ebay but I've stopped buying from "power sellers" altogether. It takes a bit of psychology to spot reliable sellers, but it's still possible.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
The problem is not the seller outbidding you on an item, the problem is the seller artificially jacking up your cost of an item by bidding against you to drive up the current bid price nearer to your maximum. You are then paying more than you should for the item even if you are willing to bid that much. When you enter a maximum bid, you essentially are saying you are willing to bid against other valid bidders up to X amount to get the item, but not more. Fraud occurs when the seller places (or arranges to have placed) a competitive bid for his own item simply in order to increase the current price so that he'll make more money out of you than he would if it was a fair marketplace. That you may be willing to pay more is not the issue, entering a maximum bid says you are willing to pay more only if you actually have to in order to beat other bidders.
eBay has been very poor at handling this, and in fact there is a conflict of interest because even eBay makes more commission when this sort of fraud occurs. Consequently, eBay may not be all that motivated to do much of anything about it.
I simply don't see what this has to do with fraud.
Would it be fraud if someone said "95% payout" and then rigged a slot machine that NEVER pays out? Sure, you are willing to lose your $1 because that is the very nature of gambling, but you also expect certain rules to be followed. It's the same with auction. There are rules. If you lie and break the rules to get money from unsuspecting people you have committed fraud. By starting the auction in the first place, you have agreed to play by the rules. So you basically lied, and that's fraud.
It is against the ebay rules. And if you're in a situation where it seems apparent that it might be happening, they have submission form in their documentation specifically for shilling complaints. And in fact, they do enforce the policy in my experience.
/not/ illegal, and they get a larger cut for auctions configured for reserves. Simply setting a reserve guarantees that ebay will receive no less than 1% of the reserve price (and substantially more for items less than about $150). If they allow shill bidding to take place, they lose money. For example, suppose you have a playstation 3 you want to sell and you don't want to let it go for less than $850. If you start the auction at $850, you pay $4.80 to insert it. If you start the bidding at less than a dollar, you take the risk of not meeting your final price, but the insertion fee is cut to only 20 cents. If you start bidding under a dollar and place an $850 reserve, it's %8.70 to start the auction. In each case, closing costs would be 3% of the winning bid plus 56 cents (since it's 5.25% on the first $25). So in this example, if a shiller were to start bidding under a dollar with no reserve, they would have to push the price up to about $1000 or $1130 for the closing fees to match the higher starting bid and reserve situations above, respectively. And the lower the final price, the bigger the difference is in the fees. In the case of an item with a 49.99 reserve selling for $50, the same item would have to sell for $83 without a reserve to generate the same fee. While it is possible that they could make more money by looking the other way for shills, there's a strong chance they'll alienate their users with high prices and frustrating auctions, face legal action if it can be shown that they looked the other way, and in all likelihood make less money than if they were to do the job themselves with reserve prices. Behold the almighty dollar.
I took part in an auction a few months ago which seemed to me to be a clear cut case of shilling. I put a low-ball bid in on a video game, got outbid, and came back the next day (after purchasing it elsewhere) to find that the winning bid that outbid mine had been cancelled but that my bid had been extended to its very top value (I think it was at $1 when I first took the top spot and I'd only offered up to $2). So before paying, I inquired with the seller as to why the other bidder's bid had been retracted. I made no statement toward either having bought the item elsewhere or toward ebay's narrow criteria for allowing retractions. I simply asked why it happened, and the reply to me was something like "Well if you don't want to pay, you should have said something sooner" or some similar BS. So then I wrote a message to the shill bidding department asking for advice of how I should proceed since, as far as I could tell, the anomolous bidding had disrupted the integrity of the auction. A few days later, I recieved an email from their loss prevention department stating hat the seller's account had been terminated and that I should not pay for the auction, as well as informing me of a few options for how I could get a refund if I had already paid. My only complaint about the process is that the form letter said I would be informed of the results of their investigation in 24-48 hours, but it was more like 72.
But anyway, there's are two strong motivations for ebay to enforce a strict anti-shilling policy: first, it's illegal in many places. Second, and more importantly, is that setting a reserve price is
Let's say I find something I want - it's rare, but not in particularly high demand - maybe no one else but me wants it. I check the "Completed listings", ignoring everything that didn't sell, then I further ignore the highest and lowest few prices, figuring those are extraordinary. Finally, I estimate the average price against everything that remains and round it up or down from there depending on the overall distribution of winning bids, trying to set my target price somewhere in the middle of the most commonly paid prices (is there a term for this whole process?), and set that final figure in my head as "fair market value". We'll call it $200 for this example.
My nature is to try to get a good deal on something I buy when possible, so I place my bid, gradually upping it each time I see that I've been outbid, to a maximum of $150, banking on two ideas: 1) It's all I can afford to pay without causing financial strain. 2) The person I'm bidding against is genuinely interested in the same item, making my original assumption wrong (about my being the only interested party). I really, *really* want the item in question, and I figure my estimate of a fair value of $200 is good, but I can only afford to pay $150 anyway, so it looks like my competitor is going to win the auction. So be it, I'll wait and find another of that item sometime in the future... or so I thought.
Enter financial instability: Suppose my paycheck arrives between the time I placed that bid, and the end of the auction, and it's bigger than I expected. Or perhaps some utility bill for this month just arrived, and shows a significantly lower than expected price. Or maybe I decided a couple of hours later not to order the $25 worth of pizza I'd previously planned to order. Any way you look at it, my total funds available for this purchase just went up a little.
Here's where the problem is - I still wanted to only pay $150, but now I can go up to say $175, figuring the other guy will drop out before I get that high. All of a sudden, at the last minute, some shill (or maybe that other supposedly legit bidder) cranks the price up beyond $175, then withdraws, leaving me holding the high bid AND CHEATING ME OUT OF $25. Why should I be expected to pay for his fraudulent act? That's why I generally increment my bids personally, rather than letting eBay do their proxy thing, so I *don't* get screwed.
I've had all three of those financial instability examples happen to me during an auction or at a time when I'm considering heading out and buying something from a Brick-and-Mortar store, and I've been lucky enough not to get screwed, maybe because I take the above steps to help ensure I'm paying a fair price.
#include(monopoly.h)
#include(paypal.h)
#include(snipers.h)
#include(nonpayingbidders.h)
#include(fakebids.h)
#include(brick_in_a_box.h)
eBay gets away with all this crap because its the only game in town. Can anyone point to a viable alternative that you can sell anything through (ie; not Etsy)? (Preferably one that doesn't ban Western Union like eBay have now that they own PayPal.)
I've had someone bid on an auction of mine in $5 increments until they got the highest bid and then withdraw the last bid. And it took about 10 bids to get there. It looks terrible, but I swear it wasn't me or anyone I know. Why they did this I have no idea. Don't assume every strange bidding means there's fraud at work, there's a lot of strange/stupid bidders out there.
I bid $300 for a item last week, the next lower bidder pushed my bid to something like $220, it didn't hit their reserve.
I couldn't find a way to push my bid to the $300 to see if it would exceed their reserve, except to setup a second acount, and thus push my own bid up (I didn't).
Perhaps you are thinking of another....
Try 30 seconds!
I snipe on ebay.
When I want something, I do some research, what's it worth in the store? How much have the last few completed auctions gone for?
With shipping would I be happy paying that much, or is the store a better deal?
then I find a specific item that I want and set the snipe for the maximum I think it's worth.
Worst case, I get outbid, but I don't feel bad, it will be more than I think the item is worth,
Neutral Case, I win at my maximum, and get a reasonable deal.
Best Case I win at a much lower price than I expected and really enjoy my purchase.
What I see too many people do is bid their maximum on ebay the day the auction starts, just to have someone come along and continue to bid, until the the auction says they are the highest bidder, knocking that first person out of the auction and skyrocketing the auction price beyond what it may be worth. Then that first bidder is so eager and new to ebay they come back and go even higher just to have it all happen again and they loose. That's a sucker!
How's is sniping different from me going to a real auction and just waiting to the last minute and bidding what i think it's worth. going way over the competition and winning. It's just the sellers that don't like the snipers because they make far more from the suckers.
Does Ebay send people out with mod points or something?
Overrated my ass.
"Snipers do nothing illegal, immoral, unfair, unkind, rude, or unexpected." Yes the do. I shall explain.
With "snipers" around, I cannot just bid on an auction, judge it's demand based on the number of past bids and walk away with an idea of the probability I'll win, or knowing that I am winning. Instead there's a flurry of activity at the end, and I only know whether I should be looking for another auction or not by the last minute of the auction.
Even bidding as you describe, placing the max. bid at what I think the item is worth to me at the time, if I bid on item A, and I can know there are no snipers, I can see I am the current winner of the bidding or not. If a sniper is watching the auction with their own max. bid in mind, it's inconsiderate to not let everyone else know NOW what they are willing pay by just bidding normally. If you did I could see you outbid me already, and go looking, and maybe bidding on some other auction in the meantime (I know ebay tells you not to bid on other auctions until others you have bid on end, but let's face it, how often do bids get cancelled? The probability a bid will get cancelled and I will be the actual winner multiplied by the average cost of the stuff I buy, is low enough for me to take as a cost of the convenience of not waiting for the auction to end.) Instead, I have to wait until the action is completely over, probably missing other opportunities as other auctions end.
See? Sniping is inconsiderate, even to a rational bidder. I can see sniping as a countermeasure to people who bid unreasonably and repeatedly when they see they've been outbid, though. But, maybe they are checking other auctions to reevaluate the situation, and actually being reasonable when they up their bids (I'm not talking about the last minute ones that make a dozen bids.) Makes sense not to go hunting for other auctions when there is a good chance you'll be winning this one.
I agree last minute bidders are worse than snipers, though. I think they should be branded with a special char. at the end of their username. But if they are not involved in a particular auction, sniping is evil.
I still fail to understand the argument about overpaying for stuff on eBay, at least on a personal level. If you have perfect information on the item (which is impossible but easier for some items than others) then you can never get ripped off. Let's say I'm a complete assbag and thus want the new Rod Stewart CD. I could get it for about $9 shipped from one of the Amazon marketplace sellers. I could also go to my local Jerk Store NBooks & Coffee and get it from the douchelord CD section for $15 with tax. If someone is selling it on eBay and I bid up to $8 (with shipping) on it, shill-bidding or not, I get it cheaper than my other two options. Sure, I could've gotten it for $6 had the shill bidder not appeared, but the end result is still positive to me. I, a (supposed) total dickhat, got my Rod Stewart CD for under than $9.
In this (fictional) recreation, shill-bidding is only a nuisance and honestly not much of a problem. If you bid your max, you can never pay more than the maximum you'd want to pay. In the example above, it is impossible to be "ripped off" and to get something for a price higher than the value to you. If the Rod Stewart CD gets shill-bid up to $11, then my (fictional) titface self never buys it. I simply get it elsewhere.
The problem isn't individual, it's collective. If a single Rod-Stewart-loving cocktard loses $2 in a transaction, it's nothing to get concerned about. But when this is happening to millions of Rod-Stewart-loving shitwads, it becomes a real problem.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
This story should be tagged "Duh." Shill bidding has plagued eBay since day one, and there have been no significant measures taken to curb it. Of course, eBay's fees are proportional, so it's in their best interest for auctions to sell for the most they can. Additionally, sellers ARE eBay's product. If they discourage sellers, they have nothing to sell. There is no incentive whatsoever for eBay to do anything more than go through the motions of deterring shill bidding.
There are only two things eBay is good for, from a buying perspective: Buying things you can't find elsewhere, or when the "buy it now" price is below what you can find elsewhere. Fortunately, there are plenty of the latter, and several of the former, so I still find eBay useful.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
...that people actually place bids days or hours before an auction even ends. You are only essentially bidding against yourself because you are giving someone the opportunity the chance to outbid you. I've bought SO many items by bidding with less than 30 seconds left. The chance of an overbid is miniscule and the shill bid wouldn't apply. Wake up, people.
You sound like one of those whiners in an online shooter game who complains about other players taking cover and using smart tactics instead of just walking around in the open to be shot. Indeed, it's interesting the choice of the term "sniping" - when you could have called it "last minute bidding" more accurately. Bidding on an auction has nothing to do with shooting somebody.
... and then they built the supercollider.
If a sniper is watching the auction with their own max. bid in mind, it's inconsiderate to not let everyone else know NOW what they are willing pay by just bidding normally.
Well then, by that criterion, the whole system is set up to be inconsiderate by employing proxy bidding. I bid $5000, you bid $10, and the current bid is $11. You still don't know what I'm willing to pay.
It sounds to me like most of the buyers opposed to sniping (including yourself) are whining because they don't get to dictate the rules of the game. That still doesn't make it illegal, immoral, unfair, unkind, rude, or unexpected.
If you buy something and don't get it, I'd call that getting ripped off. That's pretty common, but just look at the seller rating,
That might work better if e-bay feedback wasn't so ridiculously inflated. People are afraid to give honest negative feedback, because they think the other person will give them negative feedback in return. Feedback is so inflated that even a seller with 98% positive feedback is cause for concern. It's very difficult to tell whether the other 2% are people who were being unreasonable, or whether this seller is really doing a significant amount of fraud, but only a small percentage of his defrauded customers were willing to stick their necks out by giving honest feedback.
Find free books.
Well, there are two things you're missing. First, as described in the article, the bids are shills so much as they're guaranteed sales: The seller phones someone who's only somewhat (or not at all) interested in the item and has them bid a minimum.. lower than they might possibly get, but more than whatever bids currently exist. So he still sells the item for the minimum. In effect he's gaming both the "shill" and the other bidders. Second, if the shill wins, he can still withdraw. Contrary to popular belief, it's not very difficult at all to wiggle out of a win. I've done it when I had second thoughts, and it goes like this: "I apologize for the inconvenience, but I misread the details of your item. I thought it was ____ when it was really ____. Please accept my apology and cancel my bid if possible." Done. Alternatively you can say you misclicked, etc., etc. It doesn't take much creativity.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
The bottom line is don't bid what you don't want to pay and it's a non issue.
The system is set up to hide the maximum bids and only show the current winning bid. Shill bidding is cheating (through fraud, contract violation, lying) for the seller to learn the maximum bids. If you think that a seller purposefully defrauding buyers out of their money is a good thing, then post your ebay ID so I know to never do business with you.
If I walk into a store with $100 in my pocket I'm willing to pay on shoes, would it be ok for the sales force to kidnap me, take me to a back room, interrogate me for the maximum price I'm willing to pay, then change the prices on the shoes out on the store floor to what I'm willing to pay? After all, I should be happy that I got what I wanted for the price I was willing to pay, regardless that it would have been less if not for the actions of the seller, regardless that the seller broke the rules in order to find my maximum price.
Learn to love Alaska
Well, it's impossible to detect well done shill bidding. I think it's dumb to bid on commodity items in ebay. If you see an item you want, you just bid the price on it you'd be willing to pay. If it goes above that, oh well, the seller loses your business. The half.com environment is much better for stuff that should be fixed price.. and it's much better for the buyer to compare prices.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
Ebay only pushes your bid up to the reserve if your maximum is over the reserve. If your bid is below the reserve it allows it to stay at the starting price (or does the normal bidding war between you and the other seller).
Paul
It's well known that setting a low or no reserve on the item can net you a higher price in the end. The main reason for this is people get caught up in the action when the price is low, then turn it into a game to win the item.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
Moreover, sniping won't work unless your bid is higher than the highest bid the current winner is willing to pay. So even if you snipe for $1.00 more, if the current winner was willing to pay $2.00 more, you still lose. I have no problem with sniping, and it's really the only way to go, since it avoids bidding wars.. it's a win for everyone.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
That's an eternity on Ebay. I would suggest more like 2 or 3 seconds.
Remember the days when Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility?
But we are using computers and the internet. Why should our technology and methods be limited to what the "real world" does? Isn't technology supposed to improve things, and make them more efficient? By the way - eBay auctions are real. Do you think they are imaginary or something? If they are imaginary, and not real, then why would you be offended?
I would think the sellers (the ones that pay them money) would like to have sniping done away with because it should result in higher bids.I see, to benefit the sellers, and screw the buyers. The sellers already have most of the advantages on their side, why give them more? "Sniping" is really an efficient method, and tends to result in a much more accurate market price than stupid bidding wars and emotional investment.
I don't know why ebay hasn't fixed it.Because it isn't broken?
... and then they built the supercollider.
I think most sellers aren't really thinking "I'd be fine with it if I only got $1.00 for this brand new laptop." or whatever the item is. They're simply counting on eBay to live up to their promise of being the world's largest marketplace, and the fact that anyone with common sense would buy their item for more than such a small price.
So, because they took bad advice from eBay, they should be able to defraud people. I guess every time I make a mistake, I'll frame someone else for it "eBay made me do it" then turn around and defraud those around me to minimize the effect on me.
With all the whining I've seen on here of "if you don't want to pay that much, don't bid" I would think that the converse would be true, "If you aren't willing to part for it for less than some amount, set a reserve or minimum bid." Anything other than those two rules is playing outside the rules, and sometimes those rules are binding (illegal to break).
1. He/she wins the auction, getting the item for the price he/she stated he/she would pay,
What the hell is the "willing to pay" phrase doing in all these posts too? It is fraud. Yes, he was willing to pay $100 for it, but the price, according to the rules should have been $50. The shill bidder defrauded him from $50, whether he was willing to pay it or not does not change that it was fraud. Most con men get people to willingly give them money. Just because someone willingly parts with the money doesn't mean he isn't a con man.
The seller is still legally obligated to sell the item after the auction ends, for whatever price it ends up at. Shill bidding or not, nothing changes in that regard.
Well, yeah. Except the shill bidder changes the auction in the favor of the seller by using fraudulent techniques. Fraud. Shill bidding is nothing less than fraud. Why are you defending fraud? Do you do it yourself?
Learn to love Alaska
How is placing a maximum ebay bid different from this?
..." the owner stands up and yells "never mind." The item goes to the proxy at $19 (actually, on ebay it would be bumped up to the $20). The "rules" of an auction should have the item sold to the bidder at $1. The owner bid up his own item against the rules.
ebay bidding is nothing like that. With shill bidding, you'd have the auctioneer up there. The auction would start at $1. There would be a proxy bidder in the audience on orders to go no higher than $20 for the item. The bid opens at $1 from the proxy. The bid sits there. No one else bids. The owner gets nervous, stands up and bids $2. The proxy bids $3 and so on until the proxy stops at $19 and the owner bids $20 on his own item. When the auctioneer starts saying "once, twice,
Would you find that a problem in a live auction?
Learn to love Alaska
If you get quality stuff, you usually never need the warranty, as it will last longer than the warranty period. The same quality gear also tends to last when it's sold used. So, why buy new?
... and then they built the supercollider.
eBay quickly sent them a warning. They did not cancel the accounts, but threatened to do it if they were caught doing so again. eBay had traced their IPs.
Moral of the story? If you are going to shill bid, have someone do it from another location. There isn't a tinkers damn they can do if, say, your friend down the street bids a lot (as long as you don't mess with "cancelling" bids and such).
I've seen a few people gloating about sellers who end up "buying their own item", but I think they miss the strategy there. eBay is a finicky place - the same item might sell one day for $120, and the next day for $40. There are 100's of factors, from the auction end time to the day of the week. eBay fees are not as high as some people seem to think - and in many cases it's worth it to pay $4 or $5 in eBay fees to avoid selling an item for much less than you want for it. It's a gamble - sometimes you win, sometimes you don't, but if you're only out a few bucks as opposed to selling an item for nothing, some people may find it worth it.
Personally I don't shill bid. I have no need to. I sell my items at a BIN price, and if it isn't bought it isn't sold. However, since eBay is set up to not only allow but really encourage it, I don't really think it's going away. As long as you aren't doing it from the same IP (as the housewives in my example) then there really is very little eBay could ever do about it.
AE
But we are using computers and the internet. Why should our technology and methods be limited to what the "real world" does?
It shouldn't. However, causing problems and addressing them with "well people shouldn't do that" isn't a technological fix. ebay is set up more like a silent auction. It is more limited than a live auction. There is nothing ebay does that couldn't be handled with a live auction done by a person with a bank of phones and people answering them.
I see, to benefit the sellers, and screw the buyers.
No, doing away with sniping will help the bidders. I don't like proxy bidding what I'm willing to pay because of sniping and shills. I like to bid a bid, not a proxy. Evidently, you prefer that too, since you defend sniping as if it's what you do. Sniping is just a method of biding what you are willing to pay, rather than proxying for it.
Because it isn't broken?
Yeah, that's why so many auctions are buy-it-now only. The sellers are getting tired of the games being played that ebay allows, the buyers are getting tired of them too. ebay is a good place to go if you want something specific that is hard to find, or you are ignorant. I've looked for rare bargins, and they sometimes come along. But I've had something with little interest I was going to buy for less than it was worth, so the seller canceled the auction. And I've followed auctions where the snipers ended up driving the item above what I could buy it new for at the store. ebay needs to keep innovating, or they will lose out.
Learn to love Alaska
If a person goes into an ebay auction and has to type in the amount each time, they tend to think 'do I need this item this much," while if they just put in their high bid at the start this whole complaint about sellers boosting the price of their own auction would be a much bigger deal.
I have a solution for all of you who whine about snipers. It is really simple, 100 percent effective, and completely free. Bid more than you are willing to pay. That's it.
Ahh, now I see why you want them to behave this way. You are one of those sellers jacking up their own prices.
Man, am I sick of this sentiment. This is the classic slashdot response to anything. Headline: here is some information about issue "x". slashdot response: "Issue x isn't an issue at all, really the problems are that most people other than myself are morons." Ugh...
Anyways, let me hold your hand and walk you (and the various other posters who moronically fail to understand why bidding on your own auctions is dishonest) through the not-so-subtle concept of the auction:
When people are going to buy something, they know how much they want it, and what they can afford to pay for it. That doesn't necessarily mean they know how much they want to pay for it. The retail way of going about reconciling this problem is "shopping around", finding out how much an item typically costs (should cost), and then trying to pay not much more than that.
With an auction, the implication is that this is---to some extent---done for you: if you win the auction, you should have "automatically" paid a half-reasonable price for the item (ESPECIALLY if other identical items are selling for similar prices). Therefore, you should be able to enter your proxy bid closer to what you can AFFORD to pay, not necessarily what you think should be WILLING to pay (since you might not know, exactly), and be confident that things should probably work out.
When sellers bid on their own items, they are misleading people as to the market value of the items they sell---it's as simple as that. If they were honest, they would set a reserve price, or just start the bidding at the price they're willing to sell for. It is lying because they are misrepresenting the situation. This isn't complicated, right?
Amen brother. Bid the maximum amount you are willing to pay as near to the end of the auction as you can. Then the "I can't make up my mind how much this this is really worth to me, but I guess I don't mind spending a dollar more" jackasses don't have a time to outbid you.
gunbroker solved this with the 15 minute rule - any bid within 15 minutes of an auction close extends the auction to 15 minutes in the future.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
I understand the principle of entering the highest price you're willing to pay, but if I bid $11.57 and am sniped for $12.05, I'm ticked off. I would have paid $12.05 - I might have even paid $15.23. The trouble with this situation is a competition between my desire to get the best value for money versus the desire to have the product.
Now, my desire to have the product may be quite measured and rational. However, for example, the bidder who snipes me at the last possible moment for an extra 50c is takes advantage of the fact that I declared my hand early. If the price of the auction before I bid was $5.00, in effect I raised the price by $7 and established a new market value for that item at that time, only to get outbid. However, if I withhold my bid until the last seconds, but still bid $11.57, the sniper may have bid $5.50 and I may beat that bid at $6.00. By sniping in this contrived example, I would have saved $5 and won, rather than losing at a higher price by 50c.
Of course, if my snipe fails, I lose by 50c (as before), but this example is predicated on the idea that sniping has now become an eBay fact of life. Indeed, I will continue to snipe all my prospective purchases on eBay, using my highest offer as the snipe value. That way if I win the item I am satisfied that I didn't get screwed over by a trivially incremental amount, and if I lose, well, I didn't want to pay that much anyway.
( Redundancy is ) ^ n
I'm surprised there's no outcry about the other common "fix" in auctions:
I buy boutique UNIX workstations. Nothing that won't take less than a gigabyte of memory, so nothing truly dusty,
but also years and years out of date. It just so happens that there are folks that make a lot of money selling this
gear to corporate customers. So when they see the items for sale on eBay, they will bid the price up to inflate the
value of their own stock.
This only works for things that aren't valued very highly on the hobbyist market and that don't appear all that often.
Ebay could fix the feedback problem by not displaying the feedback for a particular auction until both seller and buyer have left feedback. Retaliatory feedback then becomes impossible. It also cures another problem - you leave feedback and then the other person doesn't, usually I suspect out of laziness. You would have to make this optional so it can't be abused, but it should be the default behaviour IMHO.
Must be nice to be able to afford buying multiple cars on Ebay.
Ebay could fix the feedback problem by not displaying the feedback for a particular auction until both seller and buyer have left feedback. Retaliatory feedback then becomes impossible.
That might work, but I think also a lot of people on e-bay are in small communities defined by a particular interest, so they still all know each other. Also, it's in e-bay's best interests to have inflated feedback, because it encourages people to think e-bay is safe. Same thing with fraud: e-bay makes money on fraudulent and honest transactions alike, so their motivation to stop fraud is zero.
Find free books.
I don't know why ebay hasn't fixed it.
-------------
Because it isn't broken?
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Snipers chase away customers, anyway. That's another reason eBay should fix it. Many, many people don't bid because thay know there are assholes that will steal the auction at the last second.
Sorry, eBay bidding at the last second without leaving another bidder a chance to answer makes you an asshole. There's a reason live auctioneers give you a three count before they swing the gavel.
Actually yeah it is. One was a Mercedes Benz SL560 and the other was a BMW 850i. Both of those cars were far out of my reach when they were new. Today though they fall well within my budget and they're just the kind of car that original owners went out of their way to take care. That was probably because they'd spent ridiculous money buying them new.
My one true "fetish" is expensive cars. I don't make the kind of money to be able to go nuts on them but the cool thing is that if you're willing to wait for them a little bit they're (almost) all affordable after a decade or so. I was at the Houston Auto Show this past weekend with my wife and looking at a new SL500 in the Mercedes display. It's sticker was over $100,000 and my wife commented that the car cost more than our first house. I told her that was true but in 10 years our first house almost doubled in value while this car will be selling on ebay for $40,000 in three or four years. Right now there are 2003 SL500's on ebay selling in the 40's.
Cars are bad investments but they're a lot of fun.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Ebayers get into a religious war about sniping (and every conceivable "feature" in the system) and generally resort to this "you're a moron, I'm a professional" baloney.
/worse/ than you because you're hoping that last millisecond $50 up only costs you $0.50.
No, the problem is they're combining a Vickrey auction with an English auction--then adding an arbitrary stop-watch--and that encourages sniping and rampant shill bidding. People who point this out aren't morons, they just recognize a bad system when they see one.
For bid once, bid max to work, you actually have to be forced into having only ONE bid. Once you can submit subsequent bids, no one will reveal their true max until the last possible moment, because you have no reason to believe anyone else will behave any differently. The stopwatch identified by the previous poster IS the problem. Because of the combination of sealed-yet-easily-opened bids, you reduce it to a few seconds of English auction with the reserve set by a week of unfortunate souls who've tipped their hands. What you end up with is underbidding for fear of being automatically ratched-up by shills and overbidding in a desperate attempt to outrun the shills and everyone else in a sprint to beat the clock hoping to god no one else has overbid
This is not good auction design, but it is easily fixed: enforce single-bids or reset the clock. If you do the former, you force the humans to be truthful--and completely eliminate any incentive to shill--and if you do the later, you remove the incentive to engage in the robotic 100 millisecond dash.
But, one can imagine that some very talented statisticians at eBay have figured out that the current system results in significant net overbidding and that means more money, so while it may be broken, they ain't going to fix it any time soon.
Stuff like HDs and fans can die out of the gate fairly easily. Hint: Moving parts.
Granted, it's not common to have an HD die right away, but I've had it happen [from various suppliers] and this one is nice in that they'll replace it on the spot with a new HD. Other shops in town will want a "restocking" fee, even though the drive is broken.
I would not buy a used HD or mobo. used ram/processor maybe but only after extensive testing.
Good flamebait btw.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
If you're willing to pay $15 - $35 for a widget, presumably getting it for $35 is still a deal. If it weren't why are you willing to bid $35 for it?
I get how the seller is a creep. My point is you can beat them at this game by not setting a max you're not willing to spend. If they [or their buddy] wins their own auction then it costs them money and you nothing. And chances are, you didn't want to buy from them anyways as they're not reputable.
Seems problem solved to me, n'est pas?
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
That's been my experience as well. Some time ago I was bidding on some menus from the famous Berghoff restaurant in Chicago since it was closing. I lost the auction, in which there was only one other bidder, and then received a second chance message from eBay. I'm assuming this was because the winning bidder retracted his bid. Unfortunately the second chance offer was at a higher price than I was willing to pay so I didn't respond, instead I bid on another auction for these menus. Well, that auction ended exactly the same way as the first one, but this time the seller contacted me directly to see if I was interested in buying the item directly. I didn't respond to him, but instead bid on a third auction for these items. The _third_ auction also ended the same way with some guy with only one or two previous auctions winning the item. I had been waiting for this since I began to suspect a shill bidder after the first auction and contacted eBay. I never did hear back from them, but all auctions from the seller in question were cancelled and his account was terminated.
Shilling has been happening since they opened shop. Nothing new here. You and I know eb*y doesn't care two hoots about how many shills they get. The only way to protect our butts is to bit only what you think you can afford and not a penny more. The rating system is completely screwed. If I give someone a negative rating because he's a shill, I'm sure to find one for me the next morning, even if I haven't bought/sold anything yet.
So which of your countries is it? USA? Canada? The Netherlands? County != Country
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
It is getting ripped off, because when you could have an item for less, the seller can jack up the price until they surpass your max bid, then offer it to you at your max bid as a "second-chance offer". It's happened to me before, and I doubt it's all that uncommon a practice. I could have gotten that item for $70, but instead I was given a second-chance offer at $120 (still under retail value, but a lot more than I should have paid in a fair auction). That's a ripoff.
"Those who think they know everything are of great annoyance to those of us who do." - Isaac Asimov
What about the final value fees? If you shill your item for $200 and it does not "sell" (you win your own item) you have to pay eBay your auction listing and final value fees. I suppose you could relist it once and not shill that one, or shill it lower and hope for a sell, but this practice seems to work in ebay's favor, as long as people don't stop bidding as much as a result.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
But what's the problem with sniping? Please explain why it is wrong. Fraudulent bids by sellers are a problem, but that's a different issue to sniping, and explicitly banned by the terms-of-service.
There is nothing ebay does that couldn't be handled with a live auction done by a person with a bank of phones and people answering them.That sounds ridiculous to me. How could a live auction with a fixed closing time possibly cope with a flood of bids during the last seconds of the auction? Computers can do this. Human operators can't.
No, doing away with sniping will help the bidders.How? Please explain.
I like to bid a bid, not a proxy. Evidently, you prefer that too, since you defend sniping as if it's what you do.No, I'm using both. I'm sniping with a proxy vote. So, if nobody is close to my maximum bid, then I don't pay the maximum amount. With a straight bid, I pay the maximum whether anybody is near my max price or not.
Yeah, that's why so many auctions are buy-it-now only.What the hell are you talking about? "Buy it now" has nothing to do with sniping. Can you explain what you mean, and show your evidence? Buy it now is simply a way for buyers to make more money from sellers who don't want to risk losing an auction, or don't want to wait days (or weeks) for the auction to end.
And I've followed auctions where the snipers ended up driving the item above what I could buy it new for at the store.But maybe someone else could not buy it at the store for that price - because they live in a different country or something? Again, you don't give evidence. In my experience, it is more common for early bids to drive the price up too high - while sniping usually keeps the price down.
ebay needs to keep innovating, or they will lose out.I don't think eBay are short of cash. And I certainly don't think they would benefit by eliminating "sniping." eBay depends on buyers, and eliminating sniping would drive away many buyers, as it would generally drive prices up. So they would most likely lose business if they took your suggestions.
... and then they built the supercollider.
If you're bidding multiple times on an item, you're caught up in the game and have a problem.
actually many people bid multiple times, and contrary to being "caught up in the game" they're usually the sneakier savvier type of ebayer.
Set a predetermined amount you would pay for the item yourself, but put in lowball bids, to try to get it as cheap as possible, then manually or with software "snipe the auction" in the dying seconds.
Its almost impossible to get a good deal on ebay these days, but I've gotten numerous good deals in the distant past this way.
So.. what you're saying is that eBay should institute a conditional bid option: where you specify a chain of auctions and your max bid for each and only activate the next bid if you fail to win the previous auction.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
The critical difference is the set of rules under which the bids are made. In your example, two people who are interested in buying the item are competing with each other and they settle on a price. Both they and the seller knew the arrangement when the process started and none has a reason to be upset.
On eBay, the rules are different. The rules are that proxy bidding is the order of the day and that the seller is expressly forbidden from shilling. If the seller does bid to increase the price of the item, he is deceiving the buyer. It is immaterial whether the buyer was willing to pay the price he was shilled to, the point is that, under the rules he accepted when he tendered his bid, he should have paid less.
It doesn't matter whether he got a good deal or a bad deal in the end. He got a worse deal than he should have gotten under the rules he agreed to. He was defrauded and it cost him the difference between his winning bid and one bidding increment greater than the next highest bid. As eBay points out (or did the last time I was there, several years ago), your bid is a contract. That contract is made under terms that don't allow shills -- the seller is NOT free to change the rules if he expects his buyers to honor their end of the deal.
You can argue 'til you're blue in the face about whether it's right or wrong to allow shills, but it doesn't matter. The simple fact is that the rules on eBay don't allow them. Sellers using them are fraudulently deceiving the bidders in their auctions and there's really no room to argue that they're in the right on that.
It's simply not the deal you sign up for when you place a bid. The bidder can't win the auction and then decide to pay less than his winning bid.
If the seller is not willing to let the auction run by the eBay rules (which, right or wrong, includes a no-shill rule), he is not free to just decide to ignore the rules. If he doesn't inform the bidders that he's making this change to the contract under which they're placing their bids, then he's deceiving them, plain and simple.
That eBay would de-list his auction and probably cancel his account is immaterial. If the seller is not comfortable running auctions in a format compatible with eBay, then he's free to find another forum on which to run his auctions.
It's also immaterial that no one can be forced to pay more than they're willing to pay. The fact is, they're entering a process with an understanding of how the final price will be determined. Shilling changes that process to their detriment. You can argue that shilling should be openly allowed, but it's pretty hard to make a convincing argument that deceiving the bidders is a legitimate practice.
"It is illegal and is prosecuted in real-world auctions."
Can you give some examples? I had the impression that it was common practice in art auctions, for instance. At least according to this article,
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
'Kill' the shills in one bold stroke.
It then becomes a buyer's market with no pricey auction BS games like with eBay.
Do your research and name your price (range) WITH SHIPPING for anything (legal) that you'd want to buy from such a site. Making your price low enough will only leave merchants willing to deal on YOUR terms -- not theirs (the 'WAL-MART' effect). Something I read online said the U.S Dollar today (2007) is only worth about 7 CENTS in money from the 1930s? Blame it on greed, inflation, and copious unwanted advertising in all its forms and content.
Registered sellers would look up such requests and send the buyers their best prices for stuff via such a site.
Buyers look through the list and pick the best merchant to buy the item from via such a site.
The site that does this can charge a single, modest transaction fee to the sellers for every closed transaction. This fee, subject to increase to allow for inflation and capital investments in the website and infrastructure, is the only thing such a site gets -- they are middlemen bringing buyers and sellers together just like eBay.
If a buyer doesn't complete the sale in a timely fashion -- Ban them!
If a seller fails to deliver the product sold in a timely fashion -- Ban them! (unfortunately their shipping service might be at fault and not them)
Any type of fraud or chicanery commited by buyers or sellers on such a site -- Ban them!
No more feedback BS like on eBay -- it ultimate just wastes both parties time to leave feedback and increase storage costs for such a website. It's obvious such a system can be gamed by shills working for the seller.
But then all Priceline.com has to do is make this all possible (if they can) and they can 'kill' eBay.com
You should be aware that bidding on one's own items will always be possible. Sure, it's dishonest, in much the same way as bluffing in poker is dishonest. In this kind of game (open, highest price, AKA English auction), you should know these things at the very least: The initial price isn't necessarily a price the seller wants to sell for, and you should bid very conservatively, because the auction is susceptible to "Winner's curse" - The item's selling price will usually be higher than its real value to the buyer, because the more you overestimate its true value, the more likely it is that you win.
Now if you didn't know this, and from your "shopping around" argument it seems that you don't, I might agree that you were tricked, but by eBay first and foremost. I agree that eBay and other auction sites are dishonest, because they encourage these misconceptions about how auctions work. If they were honest, they'd offer a sealed, second price auction.
"When sellers bid on their own items, they are misleading people as to the market value of the items they sell---it's as simple as that." That isn't (in itself) illegal, and it's foolish to rely on an English auction to establish the market price for something. Auctions ARE complicated, not simple, as you seem to think.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
But this is precisely equally true if you bid a week before the item ends, and bid what you're actually willing to pay for the item. Either that's more than anyone else wants to pay and you win, or it's not, and someone else gets the item. I don't see the problem.
Are people stupid enough to bid $20, and then when they see someone else bids $22 they then go and bid $25 ?
It'd allow me to buy something without being forced to either babysit the auctions, risk getting multiple copies or use sniping-software. (which are your current 3 choices)
...+3 and over, I have to say one thing about ebay:
Fuck no.
I wrote here about one of my issues I had with them last year, and it just seems to get "stupider and stupider"
That people will willingly put up with rampant fraud just so they can possibly get something on the cheap just boggles my mind. I'm sorry, but my sanity is worth more than having to deal with trying to figure out who is and who isn't out to just wantonly rip me off. If I want to gamble, I'll buy stocks or go to Foxwoods and play blackjack, thanks. At least I know that a casino is there to try to extract money from my pocket, but at least they play by rules or get shut down.
I'm going to get me some popcorn, kick back, and watch as ebay implodes due to a critical mass of daft.
Please, if someone should catch me placing a bid on something on ebay, shoot me.
--
BMO
People who defend sniping expect others to enter their maximum acceptable bid.
Yet, a sniper goes in at the last possible moment and tries to guess the maximum acceptable bids of the current participants and bids the ABSOLUTE MINIMUM NECESSARY TO WIN, using an arbitrary (and quite unique to eBay, btw) stopwatch to cut competing bids out by milliseconds. Shill bidders are similar in that their intent is to do exactly the same thing, minus the absolute minimum necessary to lose. Neither ever reveals their true maximum bid.
The reason people consider both of these beasts assholes is because they both rely on others playing by rules they do not remotely intend to apply to themselves...and then show up in message threads blaring without the slightest hint of irony that if only others would play by those un-applicable-to-me rules, their behavior wouldn't be a problem when truth be told, that would just make such behavior even more profitable. It is this final step that distinguishes a mere opportunist from a certifiable asshole.
AND they are always bidding for the same person. What is the difficulty in understanding this. Doing one thing is not bad in itself, only when you do two things does it start to look bad.
And exactly how is a "sniper" going to know your max bid? If the auction is at 8.50 and your max was bid was 12 and the sniper bid 15 or even 50 s/he had no idea what your max bid was. Snipers simply put in their max bid at the end of the auction. eBay is the one that increments the bid 50c, not the sniper. If a sniper made that max bid early...then you would have bid up to 12 anyway and would have stopped, and the auction would have still ended at 12.50. Better yet, you may have been caught the fever and paid 20 for the item instead...would that be ok?
As for getting a great deal on eBay: that is a myth my friend, it just happens that on eBay the market value for products is only slightly lower that retail. You can thank the wholesalers for that, as they sell to every Tom, Dick and Harry.
As as aside, when on eBay I typically purchase from individuals (easy to figure out based on feedback, better "deals" and better customer service) or I contact sellers/view their website/do the appropriate research when it is a company involved. Additionally, I don't often buy common, everyday items on eBay, so I don't often have to deal with getting sniped.
Why go fast when you can go anywhere? O|||||||O
So, what you're saying is you're using a system where you KNOW FOR A FACT that rampant abuse is possible and happening. But decide to use it anyways, and you're not a sucker because?
eBay should have open auctions, should require more verification of user identities, etc...In a right world you'd know the name/address of the person you're buying from before the sale goes through. That price of privacy would be the price you pay [along with the fees] to use eBay.
Bah...
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Right. You'll be telling us the pedia^H peado^H kiddy fiddlers existed before Al Gore invented the intarwebs next.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
I watched a program in a real life auction were an auctioneer did this - made up the bids. It's called "off the wall" bidding and is perfectly legal if the price is under the reserve.
Nothing illegal about it.
try to make ends meet, you're a slave to money, then you die
It depends on what you mean by "bidding on ones own items will always be possible". If you mean that it will always be easy for ebay powersellers and other big product movers to systematically secretly bid on their own products without getting caught, then this is only true because ebay will allow it. This should be preventable.
It is not dishonest "much like bluffing at poker is dishonest". In poker, you are supposed to bluff. It is part of the game. Everybody else in the game expects you to try to bluff. In auctions, you are not supposed to bid on your own auctions. The typical ebay user would feel cheated if they paid their full proxy bid (say $10) rather than significantly less than that (say the next lower real bid was $5) simply because the seller bid up their own auction.
Winners Curse is interesting, but irrelevant here. Bidding with winners curse in mind, one can mitigate the effects and still expect to pay close to the value of the item---IF the seller doesn't bid on his own auction. If he does, all best are obviously off. (If you need an example; say that the seller always bids his own auctions up somewhere near $10 above their value. Then on average, you will spend more than $10 too much every time you (randomly) incorrectly estimate the value of the item.) With winners curse in mind, a bidder can bid to approach market value in purchases. With sellers bidding on their own auctions, this is no longer possible in the same sense.
Auctions are complicated, interesting things.
That bidding on own auctions should be condemned and prevented where possible is obvious and not really complicated at all; this is a basic part of the what constitutes an auction. (Go back and read about winners' curse, the whole analysis would be different without these basic assumptions about auctions.)
Just make a decent (acceptable) starting bid, add a buy it now for something near what the market will bear and sit back and wait. No need to shill, no hassle no fuss - for example, this 5th gen video iPod I have listed:
m &ih=015&sspagename=STRK%3AMESE%3AIT&viewitem=&item =250077077194&rd=1&rd=1[/shameless plug]
[shameless plug]http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewIte
You'll notice no reserve. I could have started at $1, but experience has taught me you can get ripped off occassionally that way - so I didn't do it, instead I started at the minimum I thought I would be able to accept.
I don't need to shill, all I need is one bid.
The BIG rip off on eBay comes from non-paying fraud buyers, such as I had the first time I listed this. The guy claimed to be a resident of NY buying it for his son at university in Nigeria (big tip off there, unfortunately).
The guy picked the buy it now option and sent me a lovely email in disjointed English. Then later (to eBays credit) I received notice from them that this gentleman's account had been suspended, as he was suspected of being a fraud - non-payment of auctions. His scam was to get you to send it before he tendered payment. He wasn't very clever about it, but it only takes 1 in, say 50, to make it worth his while, and rake in a months salary.
> What if the item has become less valuable for
> the bidder?
Then the bidder probably shouldn't have already made a binding contract with the seller.
It's a life lesson. Just like the first time you try to type `rm -rF *.o` and type `rm -rF *>o` instead. It's not a failure of the system; it's a learning experience which teaches you "don't do that".
Microsoft cheerleader, blue flag waving, you got a problem with that?
> The typical ebay user would feel cheated if they paid their full proxy bid
> (say $10) rather than significantly less than that (say the next lower real
> bid was $5) simply because the seller bid up their own auction.
A lot of poker players feel cheated when they lose a significant hand because someone successfully bluffs. Feeling cheated is not the issue here. The difference is that in Poker, bluffing is sanctioned, intended behavior, and in fact is the whole point of the game, really. It's like breaking an aliance in Diplomacy: you know going into the game that the players are going to do this, that they're *supposed* to do it, that it's part of the game. If you can't deal with that, you don't play. You may still feel cheated when your ally betrays you, but that's neither here nor there.
Shill bidding in auctions isn't like that. It's widely considered illegal fraud in real auctions, and it's officially against ebay policy in their auctions. It is *not* a designed-in part of the "game".
With that said, I don't avoid ebay altogether. Sometimes it's the best source for something, especially something that can be hard to find elsewise (e.g., out of print books). But I try to be careful, and besides the usual precautions (e.g., reading the seller's negative and neutral feedback) I budget what I'm willing to spend ahead of time, and I subtract shipping from that when I bid.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I use ebay as a source for hard-to-find items that aren't in high demand, e.g., out of print books that I want for some reason. A fair percentage of the time I'm the only bidder. (When I'm not, I usually let the other guy have it if I'm not in a hurry, and wait for another copy to come up for auction in a few weeks. Think of this as weaponized patience, if you like.)
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
The difference in timing is this: bidder A bids $5 max at the beginning. But, he is willing to actually pay $40. If bidder B is only willing to pay $35 and bids early, he will lose to A. But, if he waits until the end, bidder A never raises his bid, and bidder B wins for $6. Then bidder A comes on over to Slashdot to whine that the evil snipers stole his auction. If the poor fool A had entered his maximum bid (as ebay itself suggests) he would have won the auction.
The thing is that if you bid early you're more likely to get some random moron who hates losing an auction to bid more that he normally would have been willing to pay. Theoretically early bidding results in a higher ending price than sniping.
;)
After all, the point really isn't to get the item for as much or less than you were willing to pay. The point is to get the item for as little as possible. Additionally, other auctions for the same item may exist, so if you bid as much as you're willing to pay early on you may end up with multiple items, or missing a better deal because you're stuck with your bid in another auction.
If you ask me, it's the people who don't snipe who are the assholes.
Are people stupid enough to bid $20, and then when they see someone else bids $22 they then go and bid $25 ?
Yes. Not only that, but they may do exactly that even if $20 really was the most they were actually willing to pay for an item.
It's perhaps unwise to use a site like eBay and expect not to be scammed, so perhaps its users are suckers. "Everyone else is doing it" doesn't make wrong into right. My only point is that the "suckers" are being defrauded by cheaters. At the very least these shills are violating the eBay terms of service, and quite possibly fair trade laws as well.
Personally, I haven't bought anything of significant value on eBay ever, and nothing at all for several years. Mostly this is because it's just not worth the trouble to me. Still, it irritates me to see illegitimate practices defended on grounds that they're hard to stop.
That sounds ridiculous to me.
You've hit a pet peeve of mine. Some idiot claims something is impossible because he is too stupid to think of an answer. He must presume that he is smarter than everyone else on the entire planet. No one could possibly think of some fix because he can't think of it.
Ever see a telethon? A bank of 100 phones and some chump up in front? Well, that's it. Paste the phone number on the screen of a telethon, have the operators key in the high bid onto the big board behind the MC, and you have a system that can take bids just like ebay. If you don't like that there are only 100 phones, scale it up. Yes, it will take more room and more people than a computer doing it ebay style, but it is easily doable. I can think of more ways to do it, if you like. But just one is enough to prove that you do not have the introspection necessary to have a debate with. When you enter into a debate with the assumption that you are right 100% of the time and everyone else is stupider than you (which is necessarily your position, since you claim what is impossible, making you smarter than everyone else on the planet combined), there is nothing I can say that will convince you. I'm sure that, even though the example I gave would work fine (and I have seen it actually used to hold an auction just like ebay) I'm sure you'll find some fault with it, since it is obviously so ridiculous.
Learn to love Alaska
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
I'm having a difficult time with the statement "I have an active life" followed by an anology to an online shooter game.
also, words have multiple meanings: intr.v. sniped, sniping, snipes
1. To shoot at individuals from a concealed place.
2. To shoot snipe.
3. To make malicious, underhand remarks or attacks.
"sniping." The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. 30 Jan. 2007.
I've always considered eBay to be something where the real action happens at the last minute, thus I always try to bid as late as possible. I very rarely bid twice, because usually the item that I'm bidding on is sold by multiple vendors, or will be reposted quickly.
eBay really is a seller's market. It's up to the buyer to bid responsibly. "Shill bidders" are just people who understand how the system works and use it to their advantage. Heck, when I taught my mother how to use eBay, I told her to bid "as late as possible so people have less of a chance to outbid you" and "never bid more then you're willing to pay."
No, I will not work for your startup
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
The fixing auctions, with shill bidders on the other hand, isn't as bad in my book. Just don't pay more than you want to pay for it. This is the sellers way of saying they don't want to sell it for less. Getting "caught up" in an auction for a common item is just dumb.
But what if it isn't a "common item"? Buying off-the-shelf crap that you can get at Wal-Mart on ebay is fucking retarded, and that should be obvious to everyone. ebay is items that are vintage, used, unique, or difficult-to-find. For example, when trying to buy a new Rio Karma MP3 player (now long out of production and difficult to find) it took me weeks to get one at a reasonable price because of shill bidding and the first one was defective and the seller managed to weasel out of returning my money by using third-party processers and other tricks.
Don't get me wrong, I buy and sell stuff on ebay. But certainly liked many of the other auction sites BETTER when they were around (Amazon auctions, Yahoo! Auctions) and I've leared that basically ALL of the "professional" sellers are complete scam artists.
So much for my Rutgers minor in economics :-P
I Bleed Scarlet
We drive forward when the light turns to green, not because it does.
You tell someone you are willing to pay $20, then you are asked to pay that much. What is the problem? Oh, there isn't one, I see. If you are upset because someone didn't treat you special, that's one thing. At least admit to it. If you think paying $20 is too much, NEWS FLASH, don't bid that much.
Problem solved.
Say bad words about my book, in cold oatmeal, or I shall sue!
You and I agree that you will buy a CD from me. The price will be determined by a coin flip -- we'll toss a fair coin and if it's heads, you pay $25. If it's tails, you'll pay $5. When you're not looking, I change the coin for one that is heads on both sides. Do you have a problem with that?
Breaking the rules to increase the price a bidder must pay amounts to lying, cheating, and fraud. If you don't see why this is wrong, then you're either not very smart or not very honest.
And let me tell you, the high-volume sellers are the only people that eBay really cares about or listens to, so anything that impedes their business is never going to happen.
That's not solving it at all. It's good for the seller, no doubt, but it aggravates the problem with shill bidding, and the buyer can never be sure when the auction finally ends.
But what if an operator is slow, or doesn't understand what the person is saying, and has to get them to repeat it? It introduces a massive factor of human error that barely exists with eBay.
But just one is enough to prove that you do not have the introspection necessary to have a debate with. When you enter into a debate with the assumption that you are right 100% of the time and everyone else is stupider than youWow, this is totally off the wall. Where did I imply that everyone is stupider than I am? Where did I show that I lack introspection?
I'm sure that, even though the example I gave would work fineExcept that it wouldn't work fine. How could it possibly work when someone calls with 1 or 2 second left on the clock, and still have the bid placed?
... and then they built the supercollider.
If he *also* really didn't want to pay that much, then he was being stupid.
I suppose you're rigth though, some people "hate losing", so they actually pay more than they want to pay to avoid "losing".
Ebay could eliminate this quite simply: don't display anything other than the number of bids on an item in auction, when the auction ends, the one with the highest bid wins and pays the price of the second-highest-bid. In the case where two people have identical max bids, the first bid made wins.
Maybe it's just the things I buy on Ebay that makes me not have this problem. Most of the stuff I buy there is dirt-cheap anyway, often to the point where payment is completely secondary and the main point is getting more use out of an item.
Example: we'll get twins in april. This means we need babyclothes. Tons of them. Most of them never ever get even *close* to wearing out, because small babies pretty much just sleep, eat and cry and grow quickly, so in 2 months the clothes are too small anyway. So, I ordered a crate of 200 pieces of clothing in size 0-12months, all in very good condition. (some of it like-new, some of it looks like it may have been washed 5-10 times, none of it has any holes, stains or obvious signs of wear) $50.
Frankly, it's more of a convenience-thing in this case. Buying that all new would a) cost something like $500 and b) take half of forever of baby-shop-trawling, which I, being a male, don't particularily feel like. If the end-price is $30 or $100 is completely unimportant.
The stuff that looks good after our twins have grown out of it gets sold. Again -- I'm happy that the stuff gets used, I don't care at all if I get $20 or $100. The point is, throwing it away is a waste.
I guess I'm not the typical eBayer.
I would say so. Particularly this part:
Economically speaking, this is flourishing because you are minimizing deadweight loss by matching willingness to pay with maximizing profit.
Of course, the sellers are going to be rubbing their hands, but if they didn't teach you the danger of price fixing, I seriously pity you.
It solves the sniping problem. Keeping a bidding history with names, including the retracted bids, would definitely help with exposing shills.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Not when you're bidding by proxy, which is what you're doing on eBay.
You tell your proxy how much you're willing to spend and the proxy then makes bids on your behalf up to your maximum amount. Apparently a lot of people don't understand this so they're engaging in self-defeating behavior. If you're going to keep contacting your proxy and increasing your maximum amount, then why are you using a proxy?
"Shill bidding in auctions isn't like that. It's widely considered illegal fraud in real auctions, and it's officially against ebay policy in their auctions."
EBay forbids this to protect their differentiated fee scheme, as far as I can see. In real auctions, I'd like you to show me a case where someone was actually convicted for mere shill bidding (as opposed to all the other nasty things an auctioneer can do).
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
If a person goes into an ebay auction and has to type in the amount each time, they tend to think 'do I need this item this much," while if they just put in their high bid at the start this whole complaint about sellers boosting the price of their own auction would be a much bigger deal.
If people ever thought "do I need this item this much," there wouldn't be such a problem with credit card debt. That line of thinking rarely comes into play, no matter when bids are placed. Shill bidding is actually a problem for sellers too, since high bid prices early in the auction will deter bidders (especially if the high price is the result of two dollar-at-a-time bidders fighting each other). Of course, many sellers may just like the thrill of forcing someone's hand (and then there are the ones who end their auctions early either because the bid is high enough for them or because they are worried that the item won't sell for enough - apparently they haven't heard about Buy It Now and reserve prices...). In any case, the only sensible thing to do when everyone else is nuts is to wait until the end and make your decision then.
Ahh, now I see why you want them to behave this way. You are one of those sellers jacking up their own prices.
No, actually this is a technique I employ when I know that other people are likely to be willing to pay the same amount that I am and there is no way to determine a regular price (typically these are rare and/or hard to find items). If you are willing to pay $20, then $20.50 doesn't seem like that much more - you probably would have been willing to go to $21. It gets worse if you get outbid by just a few cents, because then you know that just a slightly higher bid would have won the auction. If you instead bid $23 (or whatever it takes to get the price well into "I don't want to pay that much" territory), then getting outbid results in a "well, if you want to pay THAT much, you can have it" reaction. The problem is that it is very difficult to draw the line between what you will pay and what you won't pay (especially if there are no other prices to compare against), but you know when something is over that line. Instead of trying to find the line, it is easier to just jump over it. The key is being able to let go and move on, and bidders who place small bids every couple of seconds clearly have issues there.
See? Sniping is inconsiderate, even to a rational bidder.
No, I see you complaining that people don't do what you want them to do. People have free will and can't be compelled to disclose their intentions to you. Deal with it.
I can see sniping as a countermeasure to people who bid unreasonably and repeatedly when they see they've been outbid, though. But, maybe they are checking other auctions to reevaluate the situation, and actually being reasonable when they up their bids (I'm not talking about the last minute ones that make a dozen bids.)
The most common type of multiple bidder is the one that places many bids only seconds apart in an attempt to get the high bid (usually several days before the end of auction). These bidders are usually new to eBay and have a history of bidding the same way in other auctions (and usually lose most of the auctions they bid on). I find it highly unlikely that they are reevaluating the situation every three seconds.
Makes sense not to go hunting for other auctions when there is a good chance you'll be winning this one.
And there's your flawed assumption - that it is possible to know when you have a good chance of winning the auction. Someone can outbid you at any time, no matter how the high bid relates to the typical price of the item (bidding very frequently exceeds the buy it now price of other identical items). You never know when someone might just happen to see the auction later on and place a bid, or when someone is waiting to see how another auction turns out before bidding on that one. Maybe if you could see how many people were watching the item you could judge the odds, but there are still too many variables to consider, especially with the size of the user base. What makes sense is bidding when there is some certainty, which is at the end of the auction. Yes, it means more work tracking auctions so you have a contingency plan, but you would need that anyway due to the unpredictability of the system.