[sdiy] ebay internal shill bidding?

[Ben Lincoln]

It's been a year or so since I did much buying on eBay, but for awhile I
was manually sniping things on a fairly regular basis. I never saw
anything that made me think eBay was inflating my bids, although I did in
the past see a number of occurrences that made me think various sellers
were (which is one of the main reasons I started sniping in the first
place).

My guess would be that one of two things is happening:

- Multiple buyers have researched past sale prices or other measures of
value and are bidding roughly what they think the item is worth, which as
a result of similar research, is close to each other.

- The seller *is* manipulating the auction, but instead of shill-bidding
in the original sense, they're setting the initial price very low, then
right off the bat placing a shill bid for the minimum price that they
*really* want to sell the item for. That way when a sniper comes along,
they're only (or at least mostly) getting an advantage over other
potential buyers, not the seller as well, and the seller doesn't have to
worry about timing their counter-sniping shill bids properly.

On Tue, January 4, 2011 3:07 pm, Bob Weigel wrote:

<snip>

> Anyway examine your own results with ebay and let me know if you've
> observed the same thing.  MAYBE the guy is a hoax and I'm just having my
> usual bizarre 'luck'. lol.  However knowing how disreputably they've
> acted in the past over various things, it would surprise me..truly...if
> they were NOT doing something like this. -Bob