Posted By:
Marc S.Sometimes a low opening bid is combined with a high reserve to get people bidding on the lot.
If something has a minimum bid of $1,000, many people will shy away at starting the bids because they don't want to be the one foolish bidder who overpaid. However, if a card has a $100 opening bid and a $1,000 reserve, there may be significant bidding interest pushing the card up to (and sometimes past) the $1,000 mark. It's just a way to confirm that there will be a lot of bidding interest in an item, I suppose. Experience suggests that it generally works, too.
Kind of the same premise that the big auction houses start opening bids (for low-to-mid range items) at about 20 - 25% of expected final hammer price -- to get people interested and bidding on the item, even if they probably don't have enough dough to go all the way.