Auction Tricks

[giannifive]

Okay, so I was watching an auction on e3ay, planning to bid on it, and it ended early with the notice "The seller ended this listing early to sell to the high bidder(s) at current bid price.":

7311569372

That's an Ibanez Tremsetter for $1 people! I'm sure in actuality the bidder asked something like "I need this quick and I'll give you $25" or something like that, knowing the seller wouldn't know the actual worth of the item.

I find this to be sneaky, but it's certainly legal. Opinions anyone?

Kudos to Ashbass for snatching this up, however he/she got it!

[TAorama]

I think when they pull an auction early, the price reverts to the opening bid, hence the $1.00. Personally, I've shared several rants in this very forum on early-ending auctions. I tend to get pretty mad when something I've been watching intently ends prematurely. I'm a bit of a hypocrite, however, as one of my fave USA Customs was obtained through just such trickery.

"I do not make the rules - I merely exploit them..."

[JESTER700]

Yup. And USUALLY the seller loses money. Very rarely does anyone NEED something NOW. If they did, they'd go freekin' BUY one in a store. But sellers fall for it, not knowing that whatever the guy making the buy offer says, he'll be there at auction end with his finger on the "snipe" button.

[btangel]

heh I did that for both my RG550 and JEM7V >< I know it's kinda unfair to the others, but I offered, and the sellers accepted. I actually run risks of getting scammed doing it tho.

[bob mclaughlin]

You also know its a fraud when your the high bidder and get snipped at the last second. Then 2 minutes later you get the "second chance" e-mail saying that high bidder couldnt pay for it. (how the fu#k did they know that in 2 minutes?) Because there friend is trying to jack up the price, then you refuse the 2nd chance offer and its relisted for less than they where asking for and nobody bids on it............

[gpenguins]

Personally, I've both obatined and sold items on that auction site through email offerings in the past. My only thing is that if I sell, the offering party must be the high bidder on the auction at the time, and I always make sure I am before asking. But that's just me.

You know they now have a feature called "Best Offers" that allows all bidders to send offers to the sellers under the guise of the dark overloards of evilbay, which is cool. Problem is that the seller has to add it to the auction, and knowing them over there, they likely charge for it, so I have only seen it used like 3 or 4 times in the stuff I've looked at in the few months since they've put it in. It's a good feature, but no one uses it, although if I need to sell anything else on there (although Jemsite has been good to me lately for selling and tradings things off ), I'd use it, then I don't have to deal with people going back and forth on idiotic negotiations. Last time I listed, so many people were making such crappy offers, I just said no to everyone who asked after a couple of days.

[jim777]

It's called "back dooring", and everyone tries to do it I saw a UVMC recently and it was at 800 bucks and said "reserve met", so I tried to backdoor it at 1200 but couldn't. It eventually sold for 2900, but I emailed the seller once or twice, nice guy. Anyway, the second the auction was over, I started getting bogus 2nd chance offers from people that weren't the seller! I think I got 3 seperate 2nd chances on that guitar, all bogus. So, the whole backdooring thing is a fact of life there, but I'd be particularly careful of those 2nd chance offers.

jim