Number of Watchers of Ebay item!

[j1979]

Well the auction for my motorbike has less then a day to go! and i have 85 people watching it!!

i think this is the highest i have ever had by quite a margin

[Cozwin]

nice, ebay is great... but to many dicks... like today i got outbid by 4 pence while i went to toilet and then lost

[Rave]

nice, ebay is great... but to many dicks... like today i got outbid by 4 pence while i went to toilet and then lost

You what? Nobody with any sense bids on an ebay item unless there are less than 15 seconds to go*- and why the hell were you in the toilet at auction end? Could you not have held it?

The way that ebay works means you should always bid a little bit over the round pound- because if you bid, say, £25 and someone else has already bid £25, you lose as they got there first, whereas if you bid £25.01, it's the highest bid and they have to go with it. I've been an ebay member since 1/3/2000, and I realised this fact on about 1/4/2000. Then I realised that early bidders realised this too, and started making their maximum bid £x.05 to foil the cheating snipers. So now I always bid £x.x7 to foil them too. Sometimes it works, other times I have the consolation of the fact that the winning bidder will have to count an extra x7p out of their wallet because of the bid I chucked in with 7 seconds to go.

*unless they really want it and really can't be there when the auction ends. Occasionally that's me, and in that case my maximum bids are always £x.x7 too

[Hicks12]

Ive got 10 on my warhammer army, although admittedly yours is a much better item and im only selling as its old and not used!.

No bids yet and 22hours left after 7 days, how about yours?

[oolon]

nice, ebay is great... but to many dicks... like today i got outbid by 4 pence while i went to toilet and then lost

Buy now or snipe a "full and final" offer at 20-30 seconds to go is the only way I get items, an early bid only pushes up the price of the item for someone else who will nibble away at you till you are out bid. I wish every time bid is placed, the auction end time was extended to atleast 30 minutes if it was less.

In light of above I will now bid +0.09p!

[MadduckUK]

nice, ebay is great... but to many dicks... like today i got outbid by 4 pence while i went to toilet and then lost

i hope you mean Julian Dicks, the ex Liverpool defender.

[Blastuk]

Buy now or snipe a "full and final" offer at 20-30 seconds to go is the only way I get items, an early bid only pushes up the price of the item for someone else who will nibble away at you till you are out bid. I wish every time bid is placed, the auction end time was extended to atleast 30 minutes if it was less.

In light of above I will now bid +0.09p!

Bolded for truth!

And personally, I watch a lot of items I don't intend on buying just to see the going rate of something I might want to sell myself.

[Stephen C]

Sold some forks (mtb) the other day, out of 123 or so watchers there was only 1 bid so try not to get your hopes up!
Especially not when selling a motorbike, so so many of them will be trying it on.

[j1979]

Ive got 10 on my warhammer army, although admittedly yours is a much better item and im only selling as its old and not used!.

No bids yet and 22hours left after 7 days, how about yours?

it started 99p no res. Now its had 17 bids and is at £430. got 86 watchers now too

[Saracen]

You what? Nobody with any sense bids on an ebay item unless there are less than 15 seconds to go*-

....

*unless they really want it and really can't be there when the auction ends. Occasionally that's me, and in that case my maximum bids are always £x.x7 too

My technique, unless it's a one-off or very rare item that I really want, is simply to decide what the maximum I'm prepared to pay is. And I bid that. Then, either I win it at a price I'm happy with, or I don't and I look for the next one. If I get outbid, it's because someone wants it badly enough to pay more than I'm prepared to pay, and if that's the case, I gladly concede it to them.

Doing this, sometimes I win, and sometimes at WAY below what my max would have been. Quite often I lose, which just proves I wanted it for less than it was really worth on the market. Okay, so be it.

I do agree about the extra few pence though, but I add more than you do.

I might add that max bid of mine with days to go. If you wait for the last few seconds and snipe it still comes down to whether you're prepared to pay more than I am. If you aren't, my bid will outbid your snipe, and waiting for the last few seconds won't help you. If your snipe is larger than my bid, then it would win whether you waited or not.

What I don't do is play leapfrog with bidding. If you outbid me, you outbid me and you're welcome to it, be it 5 seconds or 5 days before the close. A seller gets one bid and one bid only from me, and I win or I don't.

I don't agree about nobody with sense bidding before the very end. It's not as if my max bid is what it's going to cost, regardless. It only costs me that if the bidding goes that high, and as it was my max, if it goes above that, it costs me nothing because I wasn't prepared to pay what it goes for anyway. If the bidding doesn't go that high, then it only costs me as much as the bidding goes, regardless of having put in a max bid higher than that.

What I'm not prepared to do is sit watching the screen waiting for the seconds to tick down. I'm not prepared to live around eBay bidding schedules. It's not that important to me.

Sniping only works if you come across a competition with someone else that's sniping, where the objective is to pay as little as you can. My objective isn't to minimise cost, it's to get something at a price I'm happy with, or to not get it at all, and not to expend much time or effort doing it.

So if you happen to be bidding against me, you'll win it if your snipe is higher than my max (and only) bid, and you won't if it isn't. My technique may not suit you, but it IS a perfectly sensible approach, given my criteria. Sniping isn't the only sensible approach.

[Saracen]

Oh, and I watch a lot more than I bid on. For a commonly occurring item, I might spend a week or two with watches running. It tells me the going price, and the spread, and gives me a guide as to what to expect to pay, and where to pitch a bid if I expect to win.

If that 'guide' price is too high, and some eBay prices are (IMHO) overly optimistic in relation to what I would pay, then I either give up or just buy a new one.

[[GSV]Trig]

I watch stuff the same as I'm going to sell so I can guage how much its going to go for too...
Number of watchers never means that many bidders..

[Fraz]

Only Saracen could expend 582 words on the simple concept of placing a maximum bid in an ebay auction...

In many of your posts, usage of lots of words is necessary. But this really isn't one of them

[Hicks12]

it started 99p no res. Now its had 17 bids and is at £430. got 86 watchers now too

How much did it for in then end then?

Mine got 6 bids and went for £62 , not bad as i valued it at £40 .

[mikemikemi]

My tactic is always to snipe, the max i'm willing to pay, sniping programs make this much easier as I don't even need to be watching it.

Most watchers I've had is less than 10............

[Saracen]

Only Saracen could expend 582 words on the simple concept of placing a maximum bid in an ebay auction...

In many of your posts, usage of lots of words is necessary. But this really isn't one of them

Will people please stop telling me how to post, because I'm beginning to get seriously pissed off with it.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. I post how I want to. If you don't like it, it's simple - don't read it, BUT QUIT TELLING ME HOW TO POST.