Re: E-bay bidding rationale ??? Message #10 Posted by Randy Sloyer on 19 Sept 2002, 7:38 p.m., in response to message #1 by Dave Mabry
For some, it must be entertainment. I know some loyal Hp bidders who wait up into wee hours particularly Sunday night into Monday morning to have first crack at the new indexes for BIN's placed at low prices (really? what's low anymore?) by those who really don't understand how eBay works best. Perhaps they have something they think is worth $50 so they list it BIN at $100, thinking they will make a killing if some fool jumps at the BIN. I have seen those last about 5 minutes when the price is right. I think the minimum bidding may be out of frustration? Heh, I can't buy it now, but I can show the world I was here first. What else can you do after you've waited for hours for eBay to get around to updates? Heh, I'm here, I might as well bid for fun, 'cause I'm not going to win anyway.
Dave, you're right about the bid amounts, I think they absolutely know they are not going to win, but they do it anyway. It is just part of the game. If it does anything, it just baits the newbies to try to outbid them by a buck. There could be a piece of pure junk up for auction and it can sit for days with no bids. When that first bid shows up at $1.99, the "everybody loves a bargain" mentality must kick into high gear and the free-for-all starts. It's not logic, it's emotion.
On the other side of the equation, the guy you mention may not end up winning many regular auctions, but I believe he has scored a red-dot 35 for $39 and a perfect 42S for $100 using the buy-it-now. So perhaps it is worth it to troll the new indexes when they pop out every 4 to 6 hours. Hey, for all we know, they may have some HTML reader bot auto surfing the calculator category looking for deltas and beeping them on their pager when something new shows up. I personally, have better things to do with my time than trying to make $10 or $20 being the middle-man on a calculator sale. It just isn't worth the risk. As I think Dave Hicks said in here somewhere, it is a totally transparent market.
Anybody who is buying on eBay to resell on eBay is going to loose. Those are my words, not Dave's. Unless of course you bought a big pile of new 32Sii's back in January on $49 close-outs. But, my crystal ball is broken, so I don't to try to figure out what is the next hot item.
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