Ebay Reserve Question
 

Opinions please...

I asked a seller of an item I'm interested in to tell me what the reserve was. The response: "Thanks for your email. Sorry in fairness to all who plan on bidding we keep reserves private until the end of the sale."

I understand why a seller would set a rerserve, but what is the rationale of keeping buyers in the dark until the reserve is finally met?

Maybe
 

they want to test what the bidding would be?

e.g. if they tell you that the reserve is $5,000 -- you can easily place a bid of $4,999, and the seller gets no intel.

If they don't tell you the reserve, and bidding w/o disclosing the reserve nets competitive bidding in the $4,000 - $4,300 range, the seller will have an idea of what the card might bring in a true auction format.

M

I don't even bid on Ebay auctions with reserves.

I"ve also watched some auctions with reserves, and the bids are
usually way short of what the item is worth, so I suspect I'm not the only one who just ignores them.

Thats in line for my practices as well,,,

I bid on an item once that had a reserve and no one met it. Then she relisted it, I bid again during her second 7 day auction too that also had a reserve. No one met that reserve either. After that she just gave me the highest bid offer below me of about $37 including shipping because I was the high bidder. The funny thing is, I bid $45 including shipping, so I got an even better price than I was willing to pay, bonus for me!:)

+1

When I see a reserve on an auction that I'm interested in, I always message the seller asking what the reserve is. Sometimes they tell me, sometimes not. I think one of the reasons not to tell, is that once buyers know what the reserve is, they often just set a snipe around the reserve price, when the seller would like the final price to be significantly more than reserve if possible. That is, they don't want to artificially surpress the true market value of the card by disclosing the reserve. I don't really think this makes a difference, but that's my guess on why they do this. As a buyer, if the seller does disclose the reserve, I determine if it's reasonable, and if it is, I still bid on it. The best example that I can think of is a M101-5 Ruth rookie in PSA 4 that was on ebay with a hidden reserve. I asked the seller what the reserve was, and he disclosed $15K, which was extremely reasonable. The card ended up selling for around $28K, so I was blown away, but I was secretly hoping that people wouldn't bid on it because of the hidden reserve.

Edit: One other thing I've noticed w/ high reserves is that the seller sometimes lowers the reserve later in the auction. That is, they may be getting an idea for what the card may go for, and then lower the reserve to the price they are satisfied with. They may also be looking to correspond with potential buyers to they can do a deal off-ebay.