cant win E BAY

[liono9]

Ever happend dto anyone when you are bidding on somethiing,well in my case bidding on a Marshall TSL 100 and as i bid it sasys "OUT BID " by someone and that too on exact that second man you just can't do anything ,its slike no matter what you do you get outbid that very moment.Anyone knows what the hell is that?:eek13:

 

[Jeff_H]

Re: cant win E BAY

It's called proxy bidding. You put in your maximum bid, and the computer automatically outids anyone who bids agains't you...up to your maximum. Anyone can do it, it's easy. You just have to decide how much you want to spend on an item right up front and plug it in.

 

[pixelpusher]

Re: cant win E BAY

It's called proxy bidding. You put in your maximum bid, and the computer automatically outids anyone who bids agains't you...up to your maximum. Anyone can do it, it's easy. You just have to decide how much you want to spend on an item right up front and plug it in.

well.... it's not really a good idea to put your max bid in right away cuz guys like me will do nickel and dime bids to feel out your max bid and then decide if i feel like you are overbidding in which case i will look for another example of the item or if you have a lowball bid in there i will guage what I think I might need to put in my sniper to beat you at the last second..

There are a couple of sniper services that are "free" if you bid on less than like 3-5 things a month that will send the bid in around 5-8 seconds before the end of the auction... and for something like $5 a month you get unlimited snipes and can set the bid time to literally the last second. I have used a couple (BidNip and JustSnipe .com) and they are both pretty good I don't ebay so much anymore so the free service pretty much gets me by.

Also be sure to check for funky spellings or weird hyphens in the items you want cuz sometimes listings will get very little traffic and you'll have a much better chance of getting what you want for a steal due to the seller not really being knowledgable about what they are selling or spelling! .. for example I have seen a few early 80's JCM 800 50 watt combos go for under 600 due to listing as "JC-800" or "Marsall" etc with only like 30 or 40 page views of the auction (checking the little counter at the bottom of the page) most JCM 800 listings get well over 150 page views by the time they sell..

anyway.. bidding early is the quickest way to drive up the price and entering a max bid just guarantees you'll pay more than anyone else was willing to pay. put the items on your watch list, set ebay to email you daily updates, use a free "sniper" and you'll end up getting more of the stuff you want for less... in my experience anyway!

now you've got me all psyched to find that elusive "JLM80 500 watt combo" for $150 :fingersx:

 

[That90'sGuy]

Re: cant win E BAY

Yep, Jeff nailed it. Proxy bidding is what most eBayers use nowadays. I use Auction Sentry and that has worked wonders for me over the years.

Why do I use it?

1) I'm not always be my computer (contrary to popular belief ), it's nice to have a program automatically bid when the time is right and for the amount that I set forth. This means I can get on with my life and check out later if I won the auction.

2) So you might be asking yourself, why not just bid in advance with the max you're willing to pay? That's simple; it's because people are stupid and will outbid me by $.10 and I'll lose the auction. No matter how high you want to pay for the item, some idiot will want it that "little" bit more. With a proxy system, you can place your bid literally within the last 5 seconds of the auction... so you bid and there is NO time for someone to outbid you (that is unless they have a proxy bid placing program as well, but if they can't match or exceed your bid, their program won't place the bid). I've seen too many auctions where people go too high with the price of an item because they have time to think about what it's set at and what they'll bid, they get caught up in the process and go overboard. Here you never have to worry about that because you don't give them time to think about it. You pretty much come out of nowhere with a large bid and they have no idea what your max was set at and even if they did, they don't have enough time to counter it.

3) Any other benefits? Well, if you don't give people the time to up the bid price by any more stupid amounts of money, very often you can get items for lower prices than you normally would. I just picked up a Gamecube with 2 controllers, 2 memory cards and 16 games for $110... you simply can't beat that! The seller hadn't described in the title of the auction everything that was included so not many people were watching it and I was lucky enough to be the only one with a proxy program on that particular auction so I sniped it and got it at a ridiculously low price. Very often you pay off the fee from registering a real sniping program after your very first auction. It's paid for itself about a million times over on just about anything. All in all, if you want a fighting chance on eBay auctions, that's the way to go :fing2: