eBay

2betterthings · ‎04-26-2024

Has anyone had an experience with a bidder backing up their bid past a buy it now price? I’m experiencing this now. (I’m hoping I’m wrong) Another bidder had to bid past that buy it now and I suspect they couldn’t do a buy it now because of it. I’ve experienced people driving up their bids but not when there was both a bid and a buy it now, only if the listing was bid only. They drive it up so high no one wants to outbid the other. And then what they do, one person cancels at the last moment so the price goes down. 2-3 people working together.

woodland_gnome · ‎04-26-2024

That is a happy occasion, not something to worry about. Buy It Now means Buy It NOW, not wait until after bidding starts and Buy It Then. It's an early-bird special for the potential first bidder to decide to buy at the fixed price instead of taking his/her chances on the auction. If the BIN button remained up until the auction ended regardless of the bidding it would act as a cap on the auction price, which is not it's intended purpose. So it usually goes away upon the first bid (a couple of exceptions to that where it remains up until the "current bid" meets a certain level).*

The last part of your post concerns something else not related to the Buy It Now: "Bid shielding" where multiple accounts are used to artificially inflate the price (and therefore the minimum bid amount) to keep other bidders from bidding up the shielded bid until the last few seconds when the shielding bid(s) is(are) retracted. eBay adopted the "12 hour rule" years ago to put an end to it (they even removed reference to the practice from the Help and Policy pages) or so they thought. It started showing up again a couple of years ago (you could tell by repeated sequential retractions of bids just before the 1 hour deadline for retracting new bids during the last 12 hours and a new bid around that time retracted just under an hour after that) and got so bad in trading card categories that eBay removed the ability to retract in those categories.

*ETA: Or at least they are supposed to under the rules as they were last set out in 2007 or so. There have been some cases (including the ~~last~~ 2 sales you had with the highest number of bids) where it remained up and was used far past when it should have gone away (those were in a "sticky BIN" category where it was supposed to remain up until the current bid reached 50% of the BIN and then go away unless you had a higher Reserve Price; as you can see it did act as a cap on the price you could have gotten by staying up too long). Whether this was intentional or not we have never been able to get a response from management about.

2betterthings · ‎04-26-2024

Ok let me explain it better. I currently have a listing that had a starting bid of $59 and BIN of $99. The first bidder bid at $59, the 2nd bidder at $77. The 2nd bidder backed his bid up to $117. The 3rd bidder currently has a bid at $118. The listing has about 2 days left. What I’m worried about is the 3rd bidder retracting her bid at the 12hour mark and then the bid goes down in the last hours. So no one could do the BIN at $99 because of it. Again I’m not sure that is what is going on. I just have had it done to me in the past and it looks suspicious that he backed it past the BIN. He could’ve not noticed it.

woodland_gnome · ‎04-26-2024

@2betterthings wrote:
Ok let me explain it better. I currently have a listing that had a starting bid of $59 and BIN of $99. The first bidder bid at $59, the 2nd bidder at $77. The 2nd bidder backed his bid up to $117. The 3rd bidder currently has a bid at $118. The listing has about 2 days left. What I’m worried about is the 3rd bidder retracting her bid at the 12hour mark and then the bid goes down in the last hours. So no one could do the BIN at $99 because of it. Again I’m not sure that is what is going on. I just have had it done to me in the past and it looks suspicious that he backed it past the BIN. He could’ve not noticed it.

That listing is not in a "Sticky BIN" category (see the ETA to my first post), so the second bidder never saw the BIN price.

"Killing a BIN" is a common practice. Intending the death to be temporary (by intending to retract in the future and come back to do the BIN) is not, since the BIN does not come back if other bids would also have killed it (i.e for listings without sticky BINs any bid kills the BIN, for sticky BINs it is more complicated) and the prime reason someone would try that is to see what others are bidding to decide on using the BIN or taking his/her chance with the auction.

If you are that worried about it, add any retractor to your Block Bidder/Buyer List (which you should anyway--eBay seems to have abandoned taking action against invalid retractions a decade ago so you are on your own to protect yourself from serial retractors), and either list fixed-price or straight auction with no BIN.