Fed up of shill bidders!

biblejohn

Well, whilst shill bidding is anoying, just like snipe bidding is, i dont see what the problem is. Sure, using the house example above you have paid 16k more for the house than you could have done, but you thought it was worth £198k else you wouldnt have offered that.

When i buy on ebay i decide what price i want to pay, then put my bid in. If i win, i win, if i dont i just look elsewhere on ebay until i win on another auction. I never check to see if i think ive just been shill bidded or not, as im happy that i got the item for what i was prepared to pay. It really is the same as buying anything from anywhere really - buyers should do their research before buying otherwise you will end up being ripped off.

Tojo_Ralph

biblejohn wrote:

Well, whilst shill bidding is anoying, just like snipe bidding is, i dont see what the problem is. Sure, using the house example above you have paid 16k more for the house than you could have done, but you thought it was worth £198k else you wouldnt have offered that.

Q. So you would have no issues whatsoever with paying the extra £16,000? _pale_

biblejohn

Tojo_Ralph wrote:

Q. So you would have no issues whatsoever with paying the extra £16,000? _pale_

Nope, if i was prepared to pay 198k for the house then id be happy paying exactly that. I know when i bought my last place, how was i supposed to know whether the estate agent really did have "another buyer" who wanted to pay x amount, forcing me to put in a higher bid of x+2k. If i didnt think the house was worth it then i wouldnt have paid that.

Its like buying a car. I can either go to an auction and buy the car for 8k. Or buy the exact same car, which a dealer has bought from the same auction, directly from the dealers forecourt for 12k. As long as im happy paying the 12k why should i care how much the dealer actually got the car for? Its the buyers choice as to what they buy, how much they want to pay & where they buy it from.

Ive done ordinary auctions for about 15 years or more and very often you do get people bidding to push up prices. Its perfectly normal. At least with ordinary auctions you dont get those very anoying snipe bidders bidding at the last possible second.

skim

Recently I saw an item at £5 and knew I would be away for a few days so bid £15 hoping to secure the item.

Anyway on my return I noticed that one person had bid £500 & withdrew the bid & then someone else had bid 5p under my maximum bid.

This is blatent shill bidding which I reported but the guy is still trading on ebay & still shill bidding with the same accounts. I've found that if I search for those accounts it shows no items for sale but if I get someone else to search for me they have a number of items for sale.

Anyway - if the guy is not willing to sell it for £5 then he should put a reserve on it not bid up to my maximum of his own behalf.

biblejohn

skim wrote:

Recently I saw an item at £5 and knew I would be away for a few days so bid £15 hoping to secure the item.

Anyway on my return I noticed that one person had bid £500 & withdrew the bid & then someone else had bid 5p under my maximum bid.

This is blatent shill bidding which I reported but the guy is still trading on ebay & still shill bidding with the same accounts. I've found that if I search for those accounts it shows no items for sale but if I get someone else to search for me they have a number of items for sale.

Anyway - if the guy is not willing to sell it for £5 then he should put a reserve on it not bid up to my maximum of his own behalf.

So you ended up with a bargin then. You were happy to pay £15 and ended up getting the item for £14.95 ?! Sounds good to me!

If people are that worried about paying their maximum price, why not just snipe bid at the last minute - that way the shill bidder wont get chance to bid the item up. If you wont be near a computer, you can use various snipe bidding programs or websites to do it for you.

Tojo_Ralph

chucky wrote:

However much it is a good analogy you have provided, the value of a house isn't the amount that would be under this discussion regarding Ebay. It's a bit like comparing apples and pears...

OK.... Lets do apples with apples.

Lets imagine you were looking at buying something on EBay for yourself/son/daughter, something you/they really wanted, something that your absolute max for was say £150, thus you placed a proxy bid and sat back.

The auction runs it's course, and your proxy gets nibbled up by the sellers shill bidding ID's to the point they are the top bidder at £152.

The seller then retracts that bid and bids £148, pushing you to £150

You win the auction, with the next genuine bidder having bid only £74.

Now..... This means that the item should have been yours for just £76

Q. Would you be quite happy to accept the above, or would you feel you had been ripped off to the tune of £74?

Tojo_Ralph

biblejohn wrote:

So you ended up with a bargin then. You were happy to pay £15 and ended up getting the item for £14.95 ?!

Where does this perverse logic come from?

If £15 was the absolute MAX the buyer would stretch to and THREE times the next highest bid, how do you deduce they got a "bargin"

biblejohn

Tojo_Ralph wrote:

OK.... Lets do apples with apples.

Lets imagine you were looking at buying something on EBay for yourself/son/daughter, something you/they really wanted, something that your absolute max for was say £150, thus you placed a proxy bid and sat back.

The auction runs it's course, and your proxy gets nibbled up by the sellers shill bidding ID's to the point they are the top bidder at £152.

The seller then retracts that bid and bids £148, pushing you to £150

You win the auction, with the next genuine bidder having bid only £74.

Now..... This means that the item should have been yours for just £76

Q. Would you be quite happy to accept the above, or would you feel you had been ripped off to the tune of £74?

Nope. You were prepared to pay 150quid, you ended up getting it for £148, saving yourself 2quid so you should be happy. If you only wanted to pay £76 then you should have only bid £76.

Alternatively, if every other one of these items on ebay only fetched £76 then why an earth did you bid £150 for this one? I generally find on ebay everything fetches the market price what its worth.

biblejohn

Tojo_Ralph wrote:

Where does this perverse logic come from?

If £15 was the absolute MAX the buyer would stretch to and THREE times the next highest bid, how do you deduce they got a "bargin"

Err, they got the item for less than they were prepared to pay! So surely its a bargin. Its irrelevant how much someone else was prepared to pay for the same item!

Tojo_Ralph

biblejohn wrote:

Nope. .

Having already ascertained that you are happy to get shafted, the question was posed for chucky who has accepted they would not be happy if ripped off to the tune of £16,000 whilst also implying they would be happy to get stiffed for lesser sums.