[sdiy] ebay internal shill bidding?

[Barry Klein]

Good example!
Man I feel stupid trying to make sense of it.
What is happening at the end there where a**y's bid jumps from 416.01 to 440
at the same time interval?
This is one of ebay's best opportunities for improvement:
present bid history so it is easier to understand for dummies like me.

Barry

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ben Lincoln" <blincoln at eventualdecline.com>
To: "synthdiy" <synth-diy at dropmix.xs4all.nl>
Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2011 20:37
Subject: Re: [sdiy] ebay internal shill bidding?


> 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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