Strange bidding pattern

blue_haddock

Hi all,

I'm pretty new to this ebay lark, the other day i listed a fairly low value item and fairly quickly someone put the first bid in (which would buy the item) and there were several people watching the item.

This morning i've logged on and the price has rocketed up, i've looked on bidding history and a newbie has made several bids for the item and driven the price up, but the bids he has made have been against himself eg

Original bidder £1
New bidder £1.20
New Bidder £1.61
New Bidder £2.23
New Bidder £2.87
New Bidder £3.40
New Bidder £3.87
New Bidder £4.35
Original Bidder £5.00
New Bidder £5.50

All the bids were within a few minutes of each other and they look as dodgy as hell to me. I've sent him an email asking for the reason he was bidding against himself and if he actually intends to buy the item but what is your views on the situation

Cheers

Kev

fiendishly

This is proxy bidding, nothing to worry about, the only reason the new bidder kept putting bids in was because he kept being outbid by the original bidders proxy. He eventually topped the proxy bid of £5.00.

blue_haddock

Oh thanks alot - i thought that if the two people had bid against each other this would show in the bidding.

soolin

blue_haddock wrote:

Hi all,

I'm pretty new to this ebay lark, the other day i listed a fairly low value item and fairly quickly someone put the first bid in (which would buy the item) and there were several people watching the item.

This morning i've logged on and the price has rocketed up, i've looked on bidding history and a newbie has made several bids for the item and driven the price up, but the bids he has made have been against himself eg

Original bidder £1
New bidder £1.20
New Bidder £1.61
New Bidder £2.23
New Bidder £2.87
New Bidder £3.40
New Bidder £3.87
New Bidder £4.35
Original Bidder £5.00
New Bidder £5.50

All the bids were within a few minutes of each other and they look as dodgy as hell to me. I've sent him an email asking for the reason he was bidding against himself and if he actually intends to buy the item but what is your views on the situation

Cheers

Kev

There's nothing strange there really. Bidder 1 had a proxy in and bidder 2 kept bidding small increments to outbid bidder 1. Bidder 2 wasn't bidding against themselves, they were bidding against the proxy of bidder 1.

It's an odd way of doing it I suppose, but then so many cash back sites like R points pay you per bid, so it might just be that bidder 2 was taking advantage of that.

I'm also not quite sure what you hoped to achieve by contacting bidder 2, he is legitimately winning your auction.

You might want to go through the ebay tutorial about selling if you are new to ebay so you can se ehow things work in an auction scenario.

Soo

fiendishly

Yes I know what you mean, but in this case the original bidder put a bid in of £5, and the new bidder kept increasing his bid in small amounts, If he'd put in £5.50 to start with the bidding would have looked like this

Orig. bidder £5.00
New bidder £5.50

The only reason it said £1 to start with was that was your starting price!
hope I've explained it OK!