Bidding late does make a difference in my experience.
In theory, the person with the highest bid wins, no matter when it was made. On the face of it, if someone comes along and bids £11 when you had decided not to spend over £10 on it then you've lost the auction fair and square. (This is the reasoning eBay gives for asserting that so-called sniping isn't a problem.)
In practice, there are people out there who seem to think "Oh, it's worth £7" - then, when that bid isn't high enough will think "Actually it's probably worth £9" and then again "Hmm, I think I want this enough to pay £11 for it". This person will win your item if you plonk your £10 bid down straight away. On the other hand, if you bid £5 and then at the last minute trump their £7 bid with a £10 bid you stand a much greater chance of winning the item.
(Last year I did actually win an item competing against someone who was raising in small increments. I placed my winning bid about 3 minutes before the end - if I'd waited another 90 seconds then I'd probably have got it £5 to £10 cheaper.)
In a sense, by placing your bid early you are showing others what you think it's worth and this may have an effect on the market value of the item. It's a complicated science…
Agreed. The downside of bidding early is that it tends to cause people who don't have a clear idea of what the item is worth to them (and I suspect they're in the majority) to revise their opinion upwards - bidding wars ensue, and neither eBay nor the vendor mind this one jot. The downside of last-minute bidding (aka sniping) is that (in the case of reserve price auctions) you don't *know* that you'll get it, and that once in a while a vendor might cancel an auction if it attracts little or no interest in the first few days.
Psychological. Once you've bid on something, you have an interest in it, you already feel it's part yours. Makes you far less willing to let it go. That's why I first took to sniping - makes it much less traumatic to lose an auction when you haven't been putting emotional effort into it all week :)
If you snipe at the maximum you are prepared to pay, and don't get it, it's too expensive, so not knowing whether you will get it isn't a downside. (You can *know* by putting in a stupidly high bid.) Unless you decide a maximum price, snipe, then decide moments later that actually it's worth more than that after all...
I think the strategy you adopt depends on whether you very much want a specific thing, or are trawling a general category for interesting stuff. Almost everything I've bought on eBay has been in the latter case, and I've just bid in a vaguely interested way, quite happy to be outbid if it goes over my (usually quite penny-pinching) maximum - lots of low-concern items rather than a few must-haves. I've been sufficiently successful at this that I've saturated my needs for trashy martial arts films and pretty jewellery ...
The solution, of course, is for eBay to instead use a "sealed bid" system. Everyone makes a bid, and when the auction period is over, they're all opened, the highest being the winner. That's nice and simple, and immune to the vagaries of last-minute bidding.
Unfortunately, it gets a lower price, and eBay's actual customer is the vendor. Furthermore, eBay's fee is based on a percentage of the selling price…
That's no solution. It's annoying for the buyer, who may have very little idea of what the item might be worth and so can't put in a sensible bid - and then can have no idea whether or not he will win the item until the auction is over - and it almost certainly doesn't fetch the best price for the seller (unless one of the buyers is intimidated into placing a stupidly high bid).
And yes, eBay has a vested interest in fetching the highest price. Nothing particularly wrong with that.
The solution, if one be needed, to the "problem" of last-minute bidding would be to automatically extend the auction until some time (say, 1-4 hours) has elapsed since the last bid.
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-06-17 09:28 am (UTC)In theory, the person with the highest bid wins, no matter when it was made. On the face of it, if someone comes along and bids £11 when you had decided not to spend over £10 on it then you've lost the auction fair and square. (This is the reasoning eBay gives for asserting that so-called sniping isn't a problem.)
In practice, there are people out there who seem to think "Oh, it's worth £7" - then, when that bid isn't high enough will think "Actually it's probably worth £9" and then again "Hmm, I think I want this enough to pay £11 for it". This person will win your item if you plonk your £10 bid down straight away. On the other hand, if you bid £5 and then at the last minute trump their £7 bid with a £10 bid you stand a much greater chance of winning the item.
(Last year I did actually win an item competing against someone who was raising in small increments. I placed my winning bid about 3 minutes before the end - if I'd waited another 90 seconds then I'd probably have got it £5 to £10 cheaper.)
In a sense, by placing your bid early you are showing others what you think it's worth and this may have an effect on the market value of the item. It's a complicated science…
(no subject)
Date: 2004-06-17 10:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-06-17 10:56 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-06-17 01:25 pm (UTC)Unless you decide a maximum price, snipe, then decide moments later that actually it's worth more than that after all...
(no subject)
Date: 2004-06-18 02:33 am (UTC)Well, _nearly_ saturated ;)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-06-17 10:39 am (UTC)Unfortunately, it gets a lower price, and eBay's actual customer is the vendor. Furthermore, eBay's fee is based on a percentage of the selling price…
(no subject)
Date: 2004-06-18 04:45 am (UTC)And yes, eBay has a vested interest in fetching the highest price. Nothing particularly wrong with that.
The solution, if one be needed, to the "problem" of last-minute bidding would be to automatically extend the auction until some time (say, 1-4 hours) has elapsed since the last bid.