[sdiy] ebay internal shill bidding?

[Ben Lincoln]

Barry, as far as I know, in a situation where two people bid at the last 
moment, the incrementing is essentially instantaneous. That's one of the 
reasons that bid-sniping works, and why automated shill-bidding should 
work (I have to imagine someone wrote software for that about five 
seconds before or after the first bid-sniping software). The client 
entering a new bid gets instant feedback on whether their bid was 
successful or not.

Here's an example auction that had a lot of activity:

http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewBids&item=220713392809&showauto=true

This one actually looks to me like "a***y" might be shilling the price 
up, because for the last couple of days of the auction they were 
manually causing the price to inch up, measuring where the current high 
bidder's maximum was. Or it could have just been someone who didn't know 
any better and had too much money to spend. I did that myself a little 
over a decade ago when I *really* wanted an SQ-80 and didn't think hard 
enough about how much I was bidding.

Anyway, you can see that whenever someone places an explicit bid 
(regular text), if the current high bidder has already set a maximum 
that is higher, it will jump up to that value (faint text). But if the 
explicit bid is higher, it will stay there. In this case, "c***m" placed 
a maximum bid of $411.01 at 14:57:49, and wasn't actually outbid until 
17:54:57, but in the meantime, "a***y" was poking away to see where 
"c***m"'s maximum was.

On 2011-01-04 19:24, Barry Klein wrote:
> I don't get into such bidding wars too often but am very often left confused
> at the bid history.  Often there are hidden bids you have to enable
> visiually to see.  Another thing is that if two or more people are bidding
> at the last moment with relatively higher bids, I would think the software
> app would somehow go through them in an order until the clock expires.  It
> doesn't necessarily take the highest bid but the last one enabled by the
> clock timeout - right?  You sometimes see this process in the hidden bids.
> When I get totally confused with it I call ebay and ask for an explanation.
> Doing that everytime will at least put them ummm... at bay.
>
> Barry
>
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