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.""

Comments

Re:Reserve Not Yet Met

[corbettw]

You'd be surprised how poorly that tends to work. First off, when you set a higher starting price, you pay higher listing fees. Second, when the price is set low initially, it can help trigger a bidding frenzy. Especially when someone decides they're willing to pay $100 for your item, so they put that in as their max bid, but their initial bid only shows up as $1. So when someone else enters a bid, it quickly starts going up and up and up. Next thing you, people are bidding hundreds of dollars because they're now emotionally invested in getting *that* item.

The psychology of eBay is pretty fascinating. I used to buy and sell on there quite a bit, and have a friend who started his own sell-it-on-eBay company, using just the tactics I described above. Sometimes you'll end up selling for less than you wanted, but more often than not you make a killing.