Who here hates on-line sellers sometimes?

[understatement]

Exactly. That's what most bidders do which is why sniping doesn't work plain and simple.

I think it’s funny you posted something like this with this posted right before basically showing that your wrong.

like in my auction I bid has high I wanted to get it for... but its not as high if push comes to shove. People don't really want to put the max on right away because we trying to get a deal.

Maybe you guys that bid on thousands of dollars of stuff a week have lost sight that most people try to live within their means and not outside them. In other words say I don’t have thousands of dollars to work with from the last few sales of my games, I might give myself $25 a week to blow I put it all in a bid for something that normally goes for $50 on Sunday and on Monday I give myself another $25 do I go and put that with my bid? No I’m already winning it there’s no point I’d rather spend this $25 on something else but if push comes to shove I will put it to the bid but I really don’t want to.

I think more people bid like this than you think. There’s no way to prove my theory but the OP is a good example of it and I myself have done it in the past and still do it if I don’t have a lot of cash to work with because sometimes you can get lucky. The reason I think this happens is there’s a big difference in $100 made at a day job and $100 made off some game that I paid next to nothing for at a yard sale. I can see where someone that makes hundreds of dollars an hour can be relaxed with their money I’m not even that hard off but it still takes about 3 hours for me to make a $100 at work and I can see if someone had a manual labor job getting paid the minimum would be even more likely to bid like this.

[understatement]

Why haven't you posted the link, like I asked on the first page? Also, as someone who has bought and sold this game myself, I highly doubt it would sell for $100. Not that much demand for this one.

It's probably this one.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...vip=true&rt=nc

Wroms Armageddon used to be worth something IDK what it goes for now.

[Scissors]

It's probably this one.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...vip=true&rt=nc

Wroms Armageddon used to be worth something IDK what it goes for now.

If that's really the auction, PROTOTYPE should be happy he lost if he only wanted it for MK3. That's the PC version of MK3, not the PS1 version.

[PROTOTYPE]

There is the link.. Maybe you are right about the seller just going for the lot, that just makes me feel worst.The last comment says it all. We want to win but at what cost? People over bid on everything,They over bid a brand new copy's they can get cheaper in the store! No get me started on Btu-rays as this happens all the time. Yes, the one with the most money does usually win and that is fair... but sometimes life is not fair and we are not so fortunate...

[PROTOTYPE]

I really don't know what to say...........

[PROTOTYPE]

I really don't know what to say...........

I thought the case look different? But I couldn't blow out the picture to make sure.

[Scissors]

For your future reference:

PS1 version (picture from Game-rave):



PC version (picture from a random eBay auction):

[jonebone]

Haha, that's great. Yeah, this reseller did you a favor, that's just MK3 on PC and there is nothing rare about it. Be thankful you lost, this was a blessing in disguise.

The search feature here sucks, or I'd link you to the thread from the WTB forum where I sold a copy. Ignore the Starblade alpha manual, but here's the pics I still have in my photobucket.




Now that is the rare small case MK3 variant that PS1 collectors talk about. By a freak of luck, I had two, and I sold my duplicate. Good luck to anyone obtaining a copy, but I will never part with mine.

[JSoup]

For the record, I wasn't claiming that 'make a bid and leave it' was what the majority (or, hell, even the minority) do. Just what I do.

[Bojay1997]

How is this relevant in any way to the discussion? Nobody else bid, so you got it for slightly less than the BIN. All you did is wait to see if anyone else wanted it and it turns out they didn't. So you paid $20 for something that nobody else wanted. Congratulations? It also shows you don't really know how much things are worth if you are waiting for other bidders to help you figure it out. That seems like a dumb way to run a small reselling business.

You've never seen auctions with an BIN option, that get bid up past the original BIN price?

Example, game with $19.99 starting bid, $29.99 BIN option.

I want it, not sure what I want to pay. I wait until the last 5 seconds to bid, to hide my intent. I can come in with a $29.98 max bid and probably win it 99 times out of 100, for closer to $20 than $30. Why? Because everyone else viewing the auction assumes it is not worth $30, otherwise the BIN would have been clicked already.

Or, I could just bid $29.98 on day one. Anyone else viewing the auction late doesn't even know the BIN existed, and just see my bid showing at $19.99. If they want it, they can push it up as high as they want it to go, well past $30.

Please don't argue with me. You asked for an example, I provided one. End of discussion.

[jonebone]

How is this relevant in any way to the discussion? Nobody else bid, so you got it for slightly less than the BIN. All you did is wait to see if anyone else wanted it and it turns out they didn't. So you paid $20 for something that nobody else wanted. Congratulations? It also shows you don't really know how much things are worth if you are waiting for other bidders to help you figure it out. That seems like a dumb way to run a small reselling business.

The example was purely hypothetical, but thanks for taking offense. For someone so "knowledgeable", you sure seem to argue with absolutely anything you don't understand. Also, I'm just a collector who collects for free, not a reselling business.

[xelement5x]

The problem with this argument is that with the way eBay works, it is impossible to prove that your sniping works.

If you snipe successfully, you avoid driving the price up there will be no evidence that you succeeded in preventing additional incremental bids since your tactic actually worked.

However, you can see when you put in your max price and watch someone chip away at it by using the bid history. I have seen this happen enough times personally that I switched to last minute sniping at my max amount. It's frustrating to see this scenario happen:

"Okay, put in my max bid of $50, but the current high bid is only $15 with an only a bit left. It'll be a great deal if I get this at $15!"
..10 mins later
"Oh the person below increased their bid, now it's up to $25"
..3 mins later
"Now they bid it up to $28"
..1 min later
"Now they bid it up to $31, still a good deal though"
..1 min later
"Now they bid it up to $36"
..1 min later
"Now they bid it up to $41.98, looks like this person really wants this"
...auction ends.
"Well I won the game at below my max price, but it's less of a good deal than it was starting out."

This is not EVERY scenario, just one I've seen play out so many time personally that I hate dealing with it. Now I just let the other person think they're in the lead for as long as they want until the last moment, then put in my max bid amount.

If it's not enough then oh well; if I win at a good price then wahoo! If there's a mix of the two with it being bidded up, c'est la vie; I've still got the item at a price at or below what I was willing to pay. But I will not just throw away the extra money by leaving it to chance and letting it incrementally be bidded up to my max price over a period of time.

[PROTOTYPE]

Haha, that's great. Yeah, this reseller did you a favor, that's just MK3 on PC and there is nothing rare about it. Be thankful you lost, this was a blessing in disguise.

The search feature here sucks, or I'd link you to the thread from the WTB forum where I sold a copy. Ignore the Starblade alpha manual, but here's the pics I still have in my photobucket.




Now that is the rare small case MK3 variant that PS1 collectors talk about. By a freak of luck, I had two, and I sold my duplicate. Good luck to anyone obtaining a copy, but I will never part with mine.

And what do you think your copy is worth?

[JSoup]

I often mussed, a few years back, about a theoretical biding system that allowed each user to only bid once. Each buyer is, therefore, encouraged to bid what they are willing to bid and what happens from there happens.

So many obvious problems with a model like that.......

[Bojay1997]

I'm not offended at all and I understand how a BIN and starting bid works. Your hypothetical just has nothing to do with sniping or proving it works or not. It also isn't the scenario the OP is talking about. All it shows is that if you gamble on a BIN by waiting till the last minute, you can get it for the starting bid. If nobody else is interested, you can accomplish the same thing by bidding immediately at the $20 level. If you wait, you run the risk of losing to somebody who hits the BIN and you have no chance to then snipe or do anything else. If to you the item is not worth the BIN or not something you really care about, I suppose that's a good way to operate. If, however, it is worth the BIN, you are taking a gamble and may very well end up not winning. Similarly, if you wait until the last minute to bid on a regular auction, you risk a side deal or a seller just cancelling the auction. Admittedly, you run those same risks even if you do bid, but I think it's probably less likely once an auction has a bid that such side dealing will occur.

The only two things that sniping accomplishes is possibly deterring shill bidding by the seller on auctions that don't have any other bids but yours and preventing other bidders from tracking your interest in auctions where there is a hidden gem that others haven't noticed. This seems to be a bigger problem lately as at least on Sealed Game Heaven, people are posting buyer's Ebay IDs and forcing buyers to wait until the last minute to bid so that others won't discover their hidden gems.

You can call it whatever you want, but you're running a small business which you then take the profits from to buy games for your personal collection. Justify it however you want, but that's how most small businesses run. The owners take the profits and buy what they want with them.

The example was purely hypothetical, but thanks for taking offense. For someone so "knowledgeable", you sure seem to argue with absolutely anything you don't understand. Also, I'm just a collector who collects for free, not a reselling business.

[understatement]

This seems to be a bigger problem lately as at least on Sealed Game Heaven, people are posting buyer's Ebay IDs and forcing buyers to wait until the last minute to bid so that others won't discover their hidden gems.

How is that happening? Like they'll take your ID after you leave feedback and tell others on the site to black list you or something?

[wiggyx]

[B]The psychology of course is that no one really knows what they're willing to pay and the intense moments at the end you end up putting in a little more, or a lot more like in that scene in War Horse.

I feel that there is a lot of truth to this.

I know what I'm willing to pay, that's for sure. But there are most definitely going to be people who get caught up in the moment and end up bidding well beyond what they had initially thought their max would be. It's happened to me in the past, and I imagine to many of us. That's just one more reason that I don't let myself get sucked into the last second bidding wars.

The only way to prove that you can get lower prices using sniping would be to get lots of data points and run some statistical analysis. That actually wouldn't be too hard on an item with a pretty steady price/value over time, it would just take a long time to mine out the data. I feel the evidence I mentioned above is pretty compelling, though.

That's what some of us are driving at; You CANNOT gather the sort of data that you're referring to. It's just not available to you, the seller, or other bidders.

No amount of "data points" that you are able to assemble would prove that sniping has given anyone an advantage.

I'm willing to bet that it does provide a small advantage in some instances, but none of us have any empirical data to prove or disprove that advantage or how often it occurs. All that we have are our own personal feelings and beliefs about it, and that's it.

Like I said before, it's just too much work and stress for me. I don't want or need anything on eBay so badly that I'm going to halt my life in order to watch an auction just so that I can put a bid in last second. I used to do it all the time. Setting an alarm for 3 am so I wouldn't miss out, interrupting dinner with my wife so I could place a bid, dropping whatever far more important thing that I could be doing in order to try and win an auction for slightly less money just seemed absurd to me. Plus, it RARELY ever worked. Most often I either lost or won at a price right around or at my max bid, which means that I totally wasted my time.

If that's really the auction, PROTOTYPE should be happy he lost if he only wanted it for MK3. That's the PC version of MK3, not the PS1 version.

!

I wouldn't have paid 30 bucks for that lot. Nothing in there is worth much of anything. That's a 10 dollar lot IMO.

How is that happening? Like they'll take your ID after you leave feedback and tell others on the site to black list you or something?

Yeah, this confuses me as well.

Are you saying that they're tracking buyer or seller IDs? You cannot track the former, so I can only hope that you mean the latter. Still, I don't understand how keeping tabs on a seller helps you win an auction or that you're somehow "blocking" someone else. Please elaborate.

[Bojay1997]

How is that happening? Like they'll take your ID after you leave feedback and tell others on the site to black list you or something?

That's partially right. Over time, people have found the names of well known bidders through feedback on old auctions and you can use them in the advanced search on Ebay to track what that bidder is currently bidding on. For anyone that finds gems by exploiting listing mistakes or things that are not fully described in the auction description, it means that they have to wait until the very end to avoid drawing attention to their finds.

[wiggyx]

That's partially right. Over time, people have found the names of well known bidders through feedback on old auctions and you can use them in the advanced search on Ebay to track what that bidder is currently bidding on. For anyone that finds gems by exploiting listing mistakes or things that are not fully described in the auction description, it means that they have to wait until the very end to avoid drawing attention to their finds.

That's 150% pure crazy shit right there. Wow.

[Jaruff]

Why haven't you posted the link, like I asked on the first page? Also, as someone who has bought and sold this game myself, I highly doubt it would sell for $100. Not that much demand for this one.

You said this lot of 8 PS1 games went for $29? If it was just anything decent and non-sports, a reseller could have figured $5 a game for a maximum of $40. You a have provided no proof for me to believe that this reseller actually knows what he has. In reality, I wouldn't be surprised if he lists the MK3 at $15 or so, just pricing it equal to a normal MK3.

People give resellers too much credit. They know what's hot and what's talked about. A niche variant on PS1 is not something that most sellers know or even care about.

This is very true. I can't think of how many times I've picked up great Genesis/Sega CD/Saturn games at my local flea market simply because the regular reseller vendors are unfamiliar with the obscure items. I've also picked up some great Nintendo stuff to resell too, simply because the vendor pushed it aside as another "common" title. In my experience, most resellers know the Nintendo powerhouses and a few of the heavy hitters (Earthbound, Final Fantasy, etc). Anything else ... it's a hit or miss. Lots of generic pricing for other brands with the exception of big franchises like Resident Evil, Call of Duty, etc.