Can someone explain ebay bidding to me in a simple example.
I saw a pair of wheels and the high bid history said $25.00 so I placed a bid of $30 and it came back and said I was out bid. So i place another bid at $70 and I’m still out bid. How do you tell what the high bid is currently without entering bid after bid until you are no longer out bid. I thought EBAY works like a live auction where you can bid against the last bid price. Do you just enter the highest price that I’m willing to pay and be done with it. If it comes back and says you are out bid - move on or enter a new price. If you have the high bid, will you pay only the amount above the second place bid. I.E. I place the high bid of $70 and the prior high bid was $50 and no one else increases the bid - do I pay $51 or $70?
So confused no wonder I’ve just used the “buy now”
Most bidders will bid their maximum bid, let’s say $100 bucks for an item that starts out at $25. E-Bay then automatically bids for them, in smaller increments (first $27, then $35 if someone else bids $30, etc), up to the maximum bid.
First of all you should wait until the very end of the auction, like 3-5 minutes prior to ending before placing a bid otherwise you’re just driving the price up. When you place your bid you should put in the HIGHEST amount of money you’re willing to pay. The system will automatically raise your bid for you incrementally. Obviously the other person bidding has a higher max. bid than $35 and everytime you put a price in there the system is upping him accordingly. Wait until the VERY end!! It’s fun that way and ya get kind of a rush!
The way Ebay is set up, you put in what your maximum bid would be, but Ebay only bids you to the next bidding increment. In your example, the previous bidder had put their maximum bid higher than the $30 you entered, but nobody made them bid that high until you came along. It works on the theory that if you were in a room doing an auction, you know what your maximum bid is, but you wouldn’t necessarilly have to bid that much. You may only have to bid $31 to be the top bidder even if you were willing to pay $40.
As a side note, being something of an Ebay expert, if at all possible, I wait until there’s less than a minute left in any auction that I bid on. A lot of people will decide once the price goes up that they are actually willing to bid more. If you bid in the last minute, they don’t have time to come in and bid again as the auction will end.
There’s no way to actually know the highest bid until you put in a bid yourself.
When you put in a bid, ebay automatically bids for you up to your highest bid. If your bid is lower than what someone else has already entered, then ebay raises that person’s bid automatically to just over what you put in. If your bid is higher than what someone else already entered then ebay will bid for you at a level just abaove the next highest bid.
The easiest thing to do is just put in the highest figure you’d be willing to pay. Then you can’t lose - either someone outbids you, or you get it for just over what anyone else was prepared to pay (either your maximum or less)
o you just enter the highest price that I’m willing to pay and be done with it…I place the high bid of $70 and the prior high bid was $50 and no one else increases the bid - do I pay $51 or $70?
Exactly. When you place a bid, say $75 when the minimum bid is $25, your bid is $25, but you will bid up to $75 and eBay remembers that. What I have always done is bid the most I am willing to spend for an item and hope no one bids above that price. I also bid a weird number, like $77.57 because usually people will have a limit they want to spend, like $75. When they stop at $75, I win with my weird bid price. Make sense?
One other thing I would recommend is don’t bid round numbers. For example, I just won a pair of Cubs tickets for $6.05. I put my maximum as $6.10 and the previous top bidder had their top bid at $6.00. I’m pretty sure they’d pay the extra 15 cents for the tickets, but they didn’t so it goes to me.
Thank you so much for telling people to wait until the end. I HATE it when people drive the price up on day 1 of an auction. Where’s your sense of adventure people???
I have sold over 1000 items on eBay, and I hate it when people bid high early. It decreases interest in the auction and inevitably the item sells for less.
regarding when to bid, if I were a seller, of course I would encourage people bid early and often; I don’t know if JohnA is kidding. Who cares if it goes high early; at least it’s high, and you don’t need the interest of those people who aren’t willing to pay higher. If I were a buyer, then I’d wish everyone bit at the very last moment–the extreme of this would be having a 7-day viewing period, at the end of which everyone submits their bid together, and the highest bidder gets it; that would be ideal for the buyer by taking the emotional aspect out of it. It’s comical to see someone with feedback score of 1 bid $50 on the first day of an auction with starting price of $0.99, and then another with a feedback score of 0 places 100 bids that gradually push the bid to $51. comical!
I can see how people get addicted!!