Ebay Auction Watchers Vs. Anti-Watchers
 

These days it seems like the vast majority of ebay watchers are anti-watchers. An anti-watcher is someone who watches an item with no intention of bidding and is hoping it doesn't sell probably so you lower the price.

Here are 2 examples: 1) A seller has an item up for auction with a 99.95 minimum bid I ask him if he'd take less. He says he has 16 watchers and if no-one bids he'd consider it. Not 1 of the 16 watchers bid. 2) I had a Mantle item for auction with a $115.00 MB. Someone offers me $170 if I sell it to him now, but I tell him I've got 8 watchers and I just listed the item today so I don't take his offer. He ends up being the only bidder of the 8 watchers and I only end up with the MB of $115 when I could have accepted his offer of $170.

It used to be that at least 50% of "watchers" on an item end up bidding. Now most watchers are anti-watchers.

Guilty! Sometimes I will anti-watch items I already have and am curious to see what it goes for, or if an item I would like to have will be relisted for less.

More often I end up going from watching to anti-watching as stuff goes way past what I would be willing to bid but I stay til the end to gawk at the final price.

Oh well. I guess you should have sold it to him.

When I see an item that I want, I bid on it and put it on my watch list. When the item is about to end, if the price is still within my range, I bid again, this time a bit over my range, with a couple seconds remaining, so that if I lose it I'm not bummed that I didn't bid enough.

Half the items on my watch list at this moment are items I do not plan to bid on, certainly not at the prices listed, but if they send me an offer (which it seems most sellers do these days) I will possibly accept, and at least counter.

I have offered a current seller an amount for two his items that he has split in two different group auctions, that is higher than what the two auctions are going to sell for. I will win those two auctions, for many more items than I am interested in, for less money than I offered him for a small percentage of his total items, and I will them keep his other items that I have no interest in to use in the future in my own sales or trades.

And I will feel no remorse about doing so.

Doug

I wouldn't call it being an anti-watcher. Maybe a better delineation is active watcher vs passive watcher.

Me, I often hit the maximum of 400 items watched, but I'm likely only interested in bidding on 10-20% of these items:

1) Actively watching with intent to bid, likely using a snipe service. 10%
2) Actively watching a Buy It Now item that is currently listed too high but hoping the seller will send me an offer to buy for less. 5%
3) Actively watching an auction that is currently listed too high and if it doesn't sell for that price maybe the seller will relist at a lower price. 5%
4) Passively watching because I own a similar item and I'm curious what the current market value is. 40%
5) Passively watching because it's an interesting item and I want to see what it sells for. 40%

For me it's :
1) Actively watching with intent to bid, I bid if nobody else has bid, then I snipe (myself, no service). 65%
2) Actively watching a Buy It Now item that is currently listed too high but hoping the seller will send me an offer to buy for less. 15%
3) Actively watching an auction that is currently listed too high and if it doesn't sell for that price maybe the seller will relist at a lower price. 15%
4) Passively watching because I own a similar item and I'm curious what the current market value is. zero %
5) Passively watching because it's an interesting item and I want to see what it sells for. 5%

My entire watch list is BIN, I've had offers which I countered at a fair price, literally $75 on a 2500 card. It's a tenouis game, as a seller once you lose "fish on" he's probably not coming back.

Some things I watch are just crazily priced, so the only reason I 'watch' them is to see if some lunatic out there will actually pay that price. Since these are usually cards that I myself own, I just want to see if there could be a decent payday in my future.

This has been going on for many years on eBay.

Most of the watchers are just that, watchers. The old phrase was tire-kickers.

No intention to bid unless the price comes way down.

It must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-watcher

I feel like Doug is reading my brain on Ebay usage to an almost perfect copy, lol. This is down to percentage everything I do as well.

I like the way you taylored your comment. ;)

I always assume that 50-75% of the watchers on my
Items are dudes selling or planning to sell the same item and they are just monitoring it to see if it sells.

Swiftly

I'm waiting for a sellers offer
...to berate them

I feel like it's pretty common to not bid on 90%+ of items in your watchlist. I certainly "track" a lot of items in each Heritage auction that I'm interested in but bid on one or none of them.

Ha!
I only caught that because of my teenage daughter. ;)

I call that "hitting the drunk-it-now button"

I think I’m about 50/50. About half of the items I watch I would or will purchase. The other half (and there are some in that half I’ve had in my watch list for over a year), just to judge price point and interest.

I started this thread about the intentions of "watchers" on AUCTIONS, not BIN.
Of course BIN's have mostly watchers with no intention of buying. Auctions are for a limited period of time and watchers should count more.

I used to watch-list auction items that were priced too high for me in hopes they would drop the minimum in the last day/hours of auction...or they would relist the item with a lower floor.

There seems to be less of either of those instances lately on stuff I'm looking and once a few re-listings gets done with the same high floor I quit watching.

There's a big difference having say 10 watchers on an auction item that ends within a week and 10, 20 or even 30 watchers on a BIN listing that has been up for 6 months or longer.

For me it's :
1) Actively watching with intent to bid, I bid if nobody else has bid - 15%, no sniping service.
2) Actively watching an auction that is currently listed too high and if it doesn't sell for that price maybe the seller will relist at a lower price. 55%
3) Passively watching because I have initial interest in the item but come to my senses and realize I don't need the item nor does it fit the collection. 25%
4) Passively watching because I own a similar item and I'm curious what the current market value is. zero %
5) Passively watching because it's an interesting item and I want to see what it sells for. 5%

My cynical side, believes that the "<insert number here> watching item" is Ebay's way of getting users to panic and buy the item.

A recent watching that occurred over the past three days.

I found the R.J. Reynolds (BIN) piece and thought it was cool. I have always liked the piece and the item comes up for sale every now and again. The water damage was a bit of a concern so I decided to watch the item to perhaps convince myself that (1) the water damage was not that bad and (2) the item was $400 cheaper and in better shape than the second Reynolds piece. While I watched, the seller excepted a best offer. Sigh.

Fortunately, I found the Old Crow piece. Yahoo! Awesome piece and an item I had never seen before. The Old Crow piece was auction format. Near the close of the auction I get in a bit of a frenzy and bid $100 over my sane amount. The final bid, was $100+ more ($455) than my insanity (for me) bid. I don't know, perhaps the Old Crow piece is worth close to $500 with shipping and taxes. Alas.

Right after the Old Crow piece went off the board, I found the Hunter Whiskey BIN piece. Again, another piece I had never seen before. I immediately sent the seller a best offer. The seller countered and a sale was made. Woo-hoo!

I only watch auctions if they have a high minimum bid, and only then if I think the minimum is not so high, that I wouldn't mind paying that, but it doesn't make sense to me to be the first/early bidder on an item where the starting bid is right around its value - that basically alerts other potential buyers that there's interest. Sometimes the item is priced high enough I think it won't get any bids, so I'm basically waiting to see what the sellers next move is (anti-watcher?). I once made the mistake of reaching out to a seller on an auction that got no bids and he replied something to the effect "someone always bids eventually". Those type situations where the seller just keeps relisting with a high floor are good candidates to drop from my watch list.

In the case of the standard 99 cent starting price auctions (I stay standard because this is what the companies who sell on eBay usually start with), I find it convenient to throw down an initial placeholder bid as that triggers eBay email reminders close to the end, which is when I really decide whether I will put down a bid that has a chance of winning. I don't see any advantage to just watching these. If someone can't throw out a bid when an item is early in the auction, say 10-20% of the what the final price will be, then if I was the seller, I would assume they aren't really interested.

Last thought on this - an auction with a high minimum bid is very similar to a BIN, so to me its a different thought process than an auction with a low minimum bid. To use real numbers similar to the OP, if I set a snipe for $115 for an item, at a time when I really don't know where it will finish i.e. bidding may be around $40, it's different than bidding on the same item that has a minimum bid of $115. My thought process in the latter case is that if I make this bid, there's a good chance I win and maybe overpaid - it just feels different than the former case where even though I set a $115 snipe, I may not wind up paying that.

More than half the stuff in my watch list is just there so I can see what it sells for.

Same.
Some of them are cards that I also own...just seeing what they might sell for. Others are cards that I want, but watching them to see if the price gets lowered at all. Still others are just cool cards that I want to see if they sell at all. ;)

ebay
 

I do a lot of watching , I think its the smart way to go, then near the end of auction decide to bid or not

I don't use the ebay watch function. I bookmark the listing and watch it periodically that way.
.

Just out of curiosity, how many listings do you follow in this fashion? For some of us, we might be following scores of listings at a time. Attempting to use your method would lead to a lot of missed auction endings.

I could see it working fine if you had just a handful at any one time, and if you were really religious about checking them every few days.

I watch and delete the list. Repeat

Sent from my SM-G998U using Tapatalk

I will only have about 3-5 bookmarked at a time, usually. As a type collector there isn't a whole lot to watch....but there is usually a nugget or two if I am patient and keep looking.
,

When I'm looking for a card that has multiple cards available I'll bookmark a bunch to easily see my options, then bid/offer/BIN until I get one, then unwatch the others ones.

Alternatively, I will also watch BINs that are close to my price with the hope of receiving a discounted offer. It seems like I get offers within a day on over 50% of the cards that I watch.

Leon, just curious why you prefer bookmarks over using the watch function. Your way definitely involves more work for you.

If you don't mind my venturing a healthy guess: one less watcher showing to the seller might make them more willing to deal (if we are discussing BINs).

To think that watchers break down into 2 groups seems inaccurate to me.

I sometimes watch because I may have one of whatever it is, the starting bid price seems quite high to me, and what the hell, IF that one sells maybe I list mine.

Sometimes I watch waiting for it to be relisted for a lower price.

And I've watched a few things because I was intrigued about some other listing they have, but I don't want to watch the intriguing item lest that calls attention to it, so I watch something else with plans of trying to research the intriguing item before bidding on it.

I watch a lot of stuff I have zero interest in buying.
90% zero interest in buying. Curious if it sells or what it sells for.
5% will snipe if it goes cheap at end of auction or trying to get an offer for an overpriced BIN listing.
5% I bookmark to own at the end of the auction.

So, in relation to ebay AUCTIONS about what percent of the watchers actually end up bidding? (I know it varies depending on the item but I'm looking for an average).

Edit: let's even include watchers that might even have any intention of possibly bidding. Not just "watching".

I don't know why I do it. There is no strategy, that takes too much effort.
I just like having bookmarks for stuff. Not really trying to do anything. Sometimes I bid on them and sometimes I am only tracking them for the final price. I would say I bid on 20% of what I bookmark and win about 8%..roughly :cool:
.

I don't watch anything on ebay either. If it's a BIN I make an offer and if they don't accept I move on. Auctions I don't watch but I do bookmark them and bid on almost all that I do. Why tip off watchers or sellers you're interested. I don't watch or bookmark anything I have no intention of buying.