Bidding on your own auction

[glchen]

Originally Posted by RCMcKenzie

Guys,

Probstein is one of a handful of dealers that list at no reserve. I have one purchase from him and it was a very rare n172 at under $200. Insane.

I list at no reserve, but I don't sell baseball cards for a living. I do it for fun and don't care if I make or lose money on an ebay lot.

When I first saw baseball cards on ebay in 1998 almost all sales were $1 and no reserve. I remember uncatalogued T214's going for 89 bucks.

This guy sold a PSA 2 1914 Meyers for under $100 the other day. His auctions are bad? Others good. C'mon.

In Texas, what you guys are calling egregious and nefarious shilling is known as an accepted, legal practice to getting an item to a reserve below market value.

You guys keep it up and no-one will sell on ebay at no reserve except for people like me who don't care what the cards sell for.

As a seller on ebay, I've hit record low prices selling cards that start at 99 cents w/ no reserve. (33 Goudey 92 Gehrig SGC 40/3 for $550, T206 Mathewson PSA 4 for $450, 33 Sport Kings Cobb PSA 3 for $300, and more where those came from.) I personally think it's nuts for the average seller to start auctions at 99 cents these days, so I never do that anymore unless I just want to get rid of the card and am willing to take whatever loss comes my way. However, I also think shilling is wrong, and it's obviously going on in the case listed in this thread. Rick Probstein runs a lot of auctions. There's no way he could keep track of it if some of his consignors wanted to shill their own items. However, once someone points out to him that it's happening, he should come down hard to them by ending the listings, outing the consignor, and banning those folks from consigning w/ him again.

BTW, if you want ebay to get rid of BINs and go back to regular auctions, mail ebay and tell them to implement the following 3 things: (1) raise BIN fees to 5% of the BIN price, with the max length of BINs still at one month, (2) remove all promotions relating to free insertion fees for listings, (3) remove insertion fees for any auction listing that starts at 99 cents or less. There would be a huge outcry among sellers, including myself, but I think if ebay did this, you'd see a lot more regular auctions again and less BINs.