many people are mear bargain hunters. They only bid on items when they think they can 'steal' them. Those people are critical to get the biding started. If they know the reserve and it is to high, they will not bid. The more people that bid - no matter at what level - the more compitition there is. Much of the draw Ebay, and for that matter all auctions, is the compitition - not neccesarily the purchase or the bargain. The periodic but unpredictable reinforcement is the most powerful. It is a lot like getting the gambling in that respect.

I have decided that for bike parts ebay is not the best place to look. I have found that if you are looking for something that is relatively popular expect to pay a little bit below retail. If you are looking for a REAL deal on some used parts or something I would go to the web boards ie. this website, roadbike review, etc. For websites I have found that jenson usa has the best prices... can't remember the URL off of the top of my head right now though

Reserves I can understand, it's designed so that the buyer will not sell it below the price they wish to sell it for...What I don't get is why they release their reserve or use a buy now for only $ XX.XX. Why not just start your bid at that price... if your objective is to get a bidding war going... Showing your reserve just doesn't make sense to me. I must be missing something.

Joe Moya

I think that the whole idea of the reserve is to 1) keep from losing your shorts in the case of lack of competition in bidding; 2) to stimulate bidding by creating uncertainty & "bidding anxiety" on the part of the bidders.

An example as to how a seller assisted a buyer (me!) by telling me his reserve. A shop was selling a brand new 2001 model Co-Motion Big Al tandem. I called him to learn more about the particular bike (warranty, etc.). Out of the clear blue he tells me his reserve is $2500. Great! I watch the bidding slowly rise to $1700 and change til the last minute of the auction. I had already decided on my max price ($3100). I bid $3100 with 20 sec to go and I win the tandem at $2500! This bike sold for $4600+ new. I saved over $2100 + tax on a brand new bike that had just ticked over to being 2 model years old. I may still have won the auction anyway without the "inside" info, but it gave me comfort and confidence to allow the auction to proceed w/o me to the last instant, helped to keep any bidding war down, and allowed me to not waste my time even bidding in case his reserve was more than I wished to pay.

vo"newtandem"2

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I sometimes use a reserve to see what people are willing to bid, without actually selling the item (unless someone meets the reserve). this is a good tactic for one-of-a-kind things that many people may not know much about. Just see what the market will do, then relist at price you think you can get (not necessarily what you want though!).

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"My strategy is to start out slow and then peter-out altogether" Walt Stack

I rarely use reserves as they charge an insane amount of money even if your item doesn't sell. I usually just start with an auction style listing and list at the lowest price I'm willing to take.

I sell lots of gear on eBay.....never use a reserve and alway start bidding at a $1.00. Some thing under sell some over sell. In the end it alway about where it should.

And the reserve fee just eat into your sale price.

Okay, but where does knowing the reserve help in this scenario? Your max was $3100 regardless, as you said you had already decided before knowing the reserve. You bid $3100 at the last minute. Bidding the max you're willing to pay at the last minute is a prudent thing to do in any case, whether you know the reserve or not, so you would have done that regardless. Worst case, you don't know the reserve, it's over $3100, and your bid of $3100 doesn't win the auction because it falls under the reserve price.

As an aside, it sounds like you got a decent price, but I wouldn't say you saved $2100 as it sounds like it was NOS from two model years ago. It sounds like you're comparing it to the price of the new model? I guess it doesn't matter to my point. I'm just saying, you're acting like knowing the reserve had anything to do with you "saving" $2100, but it didn't. The only way knowing the reserve would have helped you in your case was, as you mentioned, if you asked, the reserve was over the max you were willing to spend, and so you decided to not spend the negligible time logging into eBay a few minutes before the auction closed. Hopefully you're not going around driving up the bidding activity and price on an item you want to buy long before the auction is supposed to end.

As a general rule, I don't bid on items with a reserve that hasn't been met. Feels like a waste of my time if my bid can/will be meaningless.

People might not want to tell you the reserve because they want you to bid on the item to find out. This way it adds more bidders to the item and drives competition. The more bids there are on an item, the more desirable something looks. I've noticed people paying way more for a used item on eBay through auction than the same item new through buy it now.

For instance, I recently sold my used GoPro on eBay. Research on completed items showed that through buy it now, people weren't buying it for more than $200. Through auction, they were fetching $225. I put my item in for auction, garnered a ton of bidders and then the bidding bug set in and my item sold for $300.

That's no at all surprising.

We've had item's listed in our e-Bay store for I think it was $19.99 and occasionally put that item (we had over 100) on a 99 cent auction and saw it bring over the store price on several occasions.

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#WeAreTheForge #BlackGunsMatter

"Look, will you guys at leats accept that you are a bunch of dumb asses and just trust me on this one? Please?" BarryP 7/30/2012

So I was playing around on eBay and bid on a car (7 series BMW), the price was sort of low and the reserve wasn't met. Would do this sort of thing for fun on Porsche, Ferrari, Vipers, etc., with the idea that if I ever hit at my price it would be worth buying, but more like the fool at the auctions who just likes to be in the game and drops out when the bidding gets serious. Imagine my surprise when "reserve met" came back. The auction was scheduled to end Sunday morning (it was Saturday night) so I went to bed thinking that someone would outbid me. Checked the email later on Sunday, and received the "congrats" your the winner email. The difficult part was explaining to my wife that we just bought a car off eBay.