eBay question - what would you do?

[BCauley]

About a year ago I had a card listed at auction on there and one guy was the leading bidder for a few days. Then someone else came along, zero feedback, and kept bidding in $5 increments over the course of about 20 minutes. Had about 6 bids. Later I went and looked and saw that he had placed another bid, was the leading bidder, and immediately retracted that bid.

Bidding went higher from others and this zero feedback guy starts bidding again, even going higher than the bid he retracted. Not surprisingly, the guy who had been the lead bidder for a few days also retracted his bid. I can't blame the guy based on what this 0 feedback bidder was doing and he probably thought I was shilling my own auction.

I ended up going in and cancelling all of the bids from the 0 feedback bidder and blocking him. To cap it all off, someone else bid with two minutes left and won. Then asked to cancel 10 minutes after the auction ended.

Not wanting to deal with any further nonsense, I cancelled it and relisted. Ended up selling for about $30 more.

[Bridwell]

Here's a dark thought for you. The guy with 0 feedback might be a shill bidder for some other Ebay seller. He might have the twisted logic that throwing in a few bids on other sellers' auctions might hide that he is mainly a shill bidder for one particular seller. Not you, of course, but the buyer seeing that bidding pattern might make him nervous about getting shilled and overpaying. Panic over $10 is comical, though.