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Buying Restrictions Make No Sense
I have been buying bullion since the 1970's. Mostly at coin stores, coin shows, estates, and person to person. Just earlier this year, I decided to purchase on eBay. I am running in to a dilemma. When I place a bid on a coin, for instance, I will make my bid a percentage lower than the book value. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't. If I am outbid, I have the option to increase my bid or let it go. Most of the time, I let it go.
However, sometimes when I try to increase my bid, I get a message that I have buying restrictions based on feedback. This is confusing. I can bid a gold coin to $2095 but when I try to increase my bid to $2115, I cant. I have lost out on several nice coins recently. It makes no sense at all to allow me to bid to over $2000 and then restrict me from placing a small increment over??
What does a buying restriction based on feedback mean anyway? How do I resolve this? I am about ready to give up.
woodland_gnome
·2 years agoThat is a Buyer Requirement by the seller to block anyone (optionally only those with low feedback) from buying more than x items from him/her in a 10 day period. At least some bids on running auctions count towards the x items and there is no exception to let you rebid on that auction.
So don't bid that way. Bid your TRUE maximum that you are willing and able to pay for that particular item as listed (don't forget to back out shipping etc.) WITHOUT REGARD to what others appear or don't appear to have bid. There is absolutely no need to figure out what others have or haven't bid or might bid* in determining your bid amount, since it ALREADY will have been figured into the price if you win. While some claim tactical reasons to place a lower bid early in the auction and then wait until near the end to bid your full TRUE maximum, I advise bidding only 1 time (can't repeat it enough: at your TRUE maximum) because you are never guaranteed a rebid (and there are circumstances where the prior bid prevents a rebid on that same auction as you found out). For several reasons later bidding is better than early bidding (doesn't use up your Limits, keeps your options open, doesn't leave your hidden maximum available for others, including dishonest sellers, to probe by "nibbling" at it) and I recommend using a third party "snipe service" (do a websearch, there are reliable and secure ones that are free for limited use or there are different fee schedules that best suit your bidding quantity and ratio of wins) to place your bid during the last few seconds using eBay's API rather than the not especially reliable web interface or, worse, mobile app.
*(other than to assume someone else will value the item about the same as you, so bid a bit ABOVE any round or roundish number you come up with to increase your chances of being on the winning side of what might have been a tie or a loss to someone else who knows this tip)