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Who knows about eBay

i have an item for sale on eBay with a reserve at £135. I thought i started to understand about bidding etc :confused: . My item has had 3 bids, the price (leading bidder) was showing £60. Now i have had 4 bids and the price is showing £135 and its saying my reserve has been met. Now i thought when u put a maximum bid in, eBay would bid it to the next available amount (i think im losing myself, hope your following) but how come my auction item has jumped from £60 to £135? An eBay pro please explain!

Comments

  • PASCALI
    PASCALI Posts: 119 Forumite
    Someone has bid over £135 for it so it automatically becomes £135as it has "met your reserve" they may have bid £150, £200 etc but their bid stays at your reserve price until someone else bids over your reserve
  • highlighter
    highlighter Posts: 423 Forumite
    Ahh cheers for that PASCALI- oh well good news then...im intrigued to know what she/he has bid....
  • Unfortunatly you probably won't find out what that user's maximum bid is.
    eBay uses proxy bidding which means I could put a bid on your auction for £300 and provided the current highest bidder's bid is lower than £300, then eBay would automatically outbid the current highest bidder with my bid.
    For example: Say their highest bid was £150, then eBay would bid on my behalf at £160 (I'm not sure of the exact amount it outbids the other user at, as it goes up in stages as the price gets higher).
    If another user then tried to outbid me with a bid of £250 then eBay would log their bid in your auction's 'bids' list but it'd automatically outbid them on my behalf at £250. If they then bidded again at £270 then it'd outbid on my behalf upto £270 and so on upto my maximum bid.
    Unfortunatly if they bid at £300.01p then it'd beat my max bid of £300 and they'd be the highest bidder (which is why when bidding, it's always best to bid just over a whole amount - ie. £301 or £300.01p).

    Hope all this makes sense but my point was, there's no way of finding out how high someone was willing to bid (their maximum bid) unless they're outbid or if you ask them.
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