More eBay strangeness

[Ken Shaw]

Is it just me, or does anyone else find the bidding here just a little bit odd?

http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewBids&item=170058596046

15C with 11 bids from 4 bidders stalled at $57. Suddenly, a newly created eBay account nabs it at the Buy It Now price of $249. Is this one of those infamous sellers a la Cobubber?

[Randy]

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Is this one of those infamous sellers a la Cobubber?

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Not at all, The Bull Cabinet has been around for some time, IMO selling straight up no nonsense deals.

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Suddenly, a newly created eBay account nabs it at the Buy It Now price of $249

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That's what newbies do.

Absolutely nothing fishy to me. Your nose may vary.

[Ken Shaw]

You're probably right. Just a result of the paranoia that develops after watching too many of these auctions!

[Patrick Jamet]

I have even more strange for you:
a HP 33E

A man, with a negative profile, bids at 71 € ($ 94) then retracts for the reason "seller unreachable". Later, the same man bids again at 500 € ($ 660) for a HP 33E, and retracts 10 seconds before the end. Then a man with a confidential profile bids 4 seconds before the end.

Completely weird.

[Olivier TREGER]

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Then a man with a confidential profile bids 4 seconds before the end.

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"Nouvelan" is a frequent seller as you can see in his feedback listing:

[link:http://search-completed.ebay.com/search/search.dll?sofocus=so&sbrftog=1&catref=C6&from=R10&satitle=&sacat=-1%26catref%3DC6&sadis=200&fpos=92300&fis=2&ftrt=1&ftrv=1&saprclo=&saprchi=&seller=1&sass=nouvelan11&so=Show+Items]history[/link]

Edited: 11 Dec 2006, 6:47 p.m.

[Dave Shaffer (Arizona)]

I thought, perhaps incorrectly now, that once a real bid had been entered, "buy it now" was no longer available.

[Olivier TREGER]

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I thought, perhaps incorrectly now, that once a real bid had been entered, "buy it now" was no longer available.

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Only if the reserve price has been reached (if any)

[Rich Messeder (US)]

I am curious about another sort of eBay behavior that I see. The same bidder will be displayed as bidding maybe 10 successive bids, each higher than the last, but no one bidding against him. Why would one do that? Is there something else happening behind the scenes that I don't know about?

I have seen this behavior lately on several calculators...

Rich

[Don Shepherd]

Rich, I may be wrong (I'm no Ebay expert), but I believe that if your bid is lower than someone else's maximum bid (which you cannot see), then you must rebid a higher amount if you really want the item. And if you rebid in small increments, it may take awhile until your bid is higher than the other person's maximum. Hence, the multiple bids by the same person.

[Ken Shaw]

That's correct. Multiple bids by the same person trying to find out the previous bidder's maximum will create that pattern. EBay does not retain the intermediate high bids that are generated by the system. Only the prior bidder's ultimate maximum is retained, assuming it is reached.

[Bruce Bergman]

A bidder puts in a bid for the highest value they'll pay. If they are the high bidder, eBay records that as the current high bid. If someone else comes in and places a bid for $5.00 more (but still below the other bidders maximum), then that would get recorded as well.

It's essentially proxy bidding for you, and trumping the bid of the most recent person trying to win the auction, but at a lower price than you're willing to pay.

thanks,
bruce