(no subject)

[ewx]

So what should I know about bidding on ebay?

Comments

[crazyscot.livejournal.com]

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.

[ex-lark-asc.livejournal.com]

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 :)

[armb.livejournal.com]

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...

[rmc28]

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 ...

Well, _nearly_ saturated ;)