The thing about ebay is that you often don't know if you're being shilled, and if that's the reason that the prices are higher. For example, I went back and looked at that W511 Ruth from post 261 in this thread. I'm not saying that I know with certainty that the auction was shilled, but some of the bidders are certainly suspect. First, I know the winning bidder in this auction is legit. There is a collector that likes W511 Ruth's, which I've sold to in the past, and the feedback # matches, so I'm pretty sure it's him. However, the underbidders, I'm not so sure about. The direct underbidder with a feedback of 595, is probably legit, but there are so few bids. The second underbidder with the feedback of 649 has a few bid retractions, and a relatively high # of bids for a seller that doesn't really sell a lot of items. However, the third underbidder with the 185 feedback, is very suspect with a huge # of bid retractions. There do not seem to be any snipes that registered in this auction although it looked like the first underbidder did some "manual sniping" at the end of the auction. Therefore, if the 185 feedback bidder did not bid the item up, it is possible that the auction may have ended at a lower price since the last bidders would have been starting from a lower base (assuming additional snipes were not triggered at the lower price). What is for sure is that it is much more difficult to retract bids at AH's than ebay so the shenanigans of the 185 bidder would not have come into play in the Heritage auction.
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