Quote:
Originally Posted by slidekellyslide
I sell about 500-1000 items on ebay per month (non baseball) and get a lot of bid retractions from people who bid multiple times. They are doing it to see what the high bidder's max is, and once they go over it they retract their bid. Sometimes these bidders will bid at the end of the auction and sometimes they won't. It's not shill bidding because I own the items...I don't think we can say every time we see activity like this that it is shill bidding, there just seem to be a lot of idiots out there who bid like this. And ebay has made it easier for these idiots to do this too with the "Increase your bid" button. I have ebay connected to my iphone so I hear it when it happens.
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Agreed - I've only been selling for a little over a year (all baseball cards, different eras) and I've seen some head-scratching activity - including one bidder, the first bidder mind you, place 10 separate bids in rapid fashion on the same item. As mentioned above I think the 'Increase your bid' button, as well as starting items at $.99, skews some of the metrics when it comes to analyzing bid activity on a given item or with a particular seller (% bid with seller, as an example). The number/volume of bids can be very high with $.99 auctions and eBay's bid increments.
That said, in almost all instances where I've had a bid retraction on an item I've blocked that bidder; the few exceptions have been when a bidder immediately reached out to me to apologize for a fat finger, or when it was the first bid/early bid with an inconsequential dollar amount and the bidder put in a new bid that was conceivably more in line with their original intention (ex: $5 instead of the original $50). That's just been my experience and approach since I know that bid retractions on the surface leave a sour taste in people's mouths.