I’m not a big user of Ebay. And by user, I mean someone who buys things off of Ebay. I have bought a half a dozen to dozen things over the several years so not a heavy user.
Recently, I bought a couple of similar items and I am looking to buy one more of the same. In buying this last one though, I’m more picky about the cost so I want to make a good deal on it and so I’ve made some observations about the purchase process.
Ebay has given buyers some nifty tools to use such as automatic bidding but people use these tools TOO DARN EARLY! If you set up an automatic bid at the beginning for an item that start’s at a $1 and tell it you are willing to go to $25 then what happens is that the price is driven up right away to $26 by the next bidder who also has probably set up an automatic bid scheme but theirs is set up to drive it to $40 which then drives the price to $41 and so on and so on.
Now, I can’t be sure of my theory here but I believe if these automatic bids were not put into place till the last few minutes, then the price would not have a chance to go up so high and it would be a matter of “chance” or “timing” of which of the automatic bids win by when the clock ran out. It’s possible the price would still be driven up as high but I don’t think so because everyone would be setting up their automatic bids with some starting and end bids not knowing what others were doing so, the highest end bid would likely get it or the highest end bid timed closest to the end of the bidding time would get it. This would would favor the buyer rather than the seller.
Of course, it’s not going to change as coordinating buyers is like herding cats.