OT: How many bids do you need to win?

Ummm... I don't get it... why raise your own bid, (the winning bid no less) one cent at a time? Either he was bored or he was practicing his manual sniping skills.

Or he was required to provide proof of insanity to the mental health board.

Cory
 
A virus perhaps? I've never seen an auction where the minimum bid increment wasn't at least 5 cents, and it's usually at least a quarter. eBay's programming won't allow for 1 cent bid increments....
 
TanguayFan said:
A virus perhaps? I've never seen an auction where the minimum bid increment wasn't at least 5 cents, and it's usually at least a quarter. eBay's programming won't allow for 1 cent bid increments....
Click to expand...

False.

You can place $0.01 bid increments if you are the leading bidder at the time. Many people like to place several high bids when already in the lead to give a false impression that they have a ridiculous amount set to win. Just trying to scare off potential competing bidders.
 
Oh. I guess you learn something new everyday. :D

Regardless, it's gotta be some sort of program or virus doing that. Nobody in their right mind would go to those lengths, nor would most people have the time to sit there and re-enter numbers 300+ times...
 
What I don't get is how Bidder 2 can enter that many numbers below Bidder 1's bid. Shouldn't there only be one bid under Bidder 1's max?
 
Back when Ebay was new there used to be something called a "Hot Item". There would be a little logo next to the auction if the auction received more than 30 bids. Two people I used to work with at Office Max (Circa 1998) would buy monitors on sale with their employee discount and list them on Ebay and take turns schilling up the auction until they received the "Hot Item" logo. They would also bid on their own auction to "Protect their investment" with their own user ID.

I don't know if ebay does a hot item button anymore, but this guy is obviously messed in the skull.

Shawn
 
stab107 said:
What I don't get is how Bidder 2 can enter that many numbers below Bidder 1's bid. Shouldn't there only be one bid under Bidder 1's max?
Click to expand...

Nah - as long as you keep increasing the bid amount only by the minimum increment, you can slide under someone else bid as often as you want. And if you're the leading bidder, you only have to increase by 1 cent (which he did).

I guess that's a Nova-Hot item with that many bids... :D

Cory
 
I ran into this the other day as well. I think that the buyer is trying to save a very small amount of money. Here is a situation. A Gaborik card comes up that I want to buy. The minimum bid is $1 and I expect the card to sell for $20. I bid the initial $1 to get the card on my My EBay page. Another bidder (bidder 2) comes along. He can now bid $1.25. If he does this, he will be the high bidder. Once you are the high bidder, you can just keep increasing your bid by amount amount, as small as $.01. So now bidder 2 bids $1.26, $1.27, $1.28 all the way up to $25.00.

I (or another bidder) now come back and bid $5. What will eBay say? That bidder 2 is the high bidder for $5.01! If I bid $6.75, bidder 2 will be the high bidder at $6.76. If bidder 2 had just put in one bid of $25, there bids in these cases would be $5.25 and $7 repectively.

I think eBay changed this recently, in part due to a class action law suit that they lost. If you are really bored, here is a story about it:

http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/3485301

So the bidder I ran into was trying to save like $.24 or something. Must be nice to have lots of free time!

OK, I will now go back to lurking :)

Wayne
 

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