O/T Pet Peeve on Best Offers (Ebay)

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Posted By: Red

Without knowing what the card is it's hard for us to judge how crazy, or justified, the guy's price is. If it comes up for sale frequently then it's not worth bothering the guy and you just buy it someplace else. If it's rarely offered and hard to value then the original seller starting it at a high price made it hard for potential buyers to ascertain a value. People may have been unsure what the card was worth and some figured on being able to contact the seller after the listing ended with no bids to make a deal. The one person brave enough to place a bid stopped that from happening.

It's possible that had the seller started it out at $1 and then allowed a bunch of people unsure of its value determine the final price, it could have far exceeded the BIN he had it priced at. Say the item had a $1000 BIN and you just didn't feel confident enough to make that bid. It's later auctioned and all the participants in the auction now see that there are other people willing to pay 500, 600, 800, 900, 1100, etc. You now have the confidence to bid 1200 knowing that somebody else was willing to pay 1100. Another guy or two starts thinking the same way and the item winds up selling for a lot more, maybe more than it should sell for. But the winner's happy because he only had to pay one bid more than the underbidder.