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Canceling a bid
I suspect there may be shill bidding or some other kind of manipulation on some, if not all the items I bid on. Usually I wait until the end of the auction to place a bid and almost every time, I get outbid immediately. I bid on a lot of items so this seems like quite a coincidence that I get out bided on every single auction. I noticed that every item I was interested in always had a bid almost immediately after it was listed. Again, what a coincidence! So I decided to test out a theory. I bided early to see what would happen. Of course my bid was always too low and I rarely became a high bidder. The only time I was high bidder was if it was a low price item (I mean low as in a couple of bucks) and when that happened, I was the first bidder. It seems these sellers don’t bother with the low price items. Anyway, by some miraculous coincidence that seems to happen frequently, about a day or less before the auction ends, the high bidder retracts their bid and I become the high bidder! Not only does the previous high bidder retract their bid, but someone else comes along and bids up the price just enough to force me to become the high bidder. I tell you, I never thought such miracles occurred anymore. Only on eBay can such things happen with any kind of predictability.
I have read the feedback for some of these sellers and it is yet another coincidence that they all have the same comments! I know these sellers are selling under numerous user ID names and each seller seems to have at least three or four (if not more) accounts selling the same stuff under different names. Also, the feedback is nonsense. “Thank you very much for the authentic item(s).†Who writes feedback like that? If I’m writing a positive feedback, I would say something specific to the item, and I would certainly not write item(s).
I decided to try to cancel my bid on an item that I’m expecting to miraculously become the high bidder of as it ends in 23 hours. By the time I wake up tomorrow morning, I’m pretty sure I’ll get that email stating the high bidder cancelled their bid. However, I couldn’t cancel the bid. eBay would not allow it. When I tried, it said something to the effect of, even though as the highest bidder my bid did not meet the sellers reserve price (WHAT???), I would not be allowed to cancel my bid. There are so many things wrong with this statement. First of all, I am not the high bidder. I checked again. Nope, still not the high bidder. And what reserve? There is no reserve mentioned in this (or any other) auction. I know I’m going to once again win due to a bid cancellation. That’s why I wanted to cancel my bid. I think this is deceptive and I am fairly certain the bidding is being manipulated, although I can’t prove it. Since these auctions are all run by sellers in China, I doubt eBay can effectively track them when they do their shill bidding or whatever manipulative tactics they’re using.
woodland_gnome
·1 year agoYour suspicion is not a valid reason to retract your bid.
Besides that a bid cannot be retracted (bidders retract, sellers cancel and can do so up until the end of the auction for almost any reason) more than 1 hour after it was placed unless there are more than 12 hours left to go on the auction. ALSO in various trading card categories a bid cannot be retracted at all, not at any time, not for any reason (a couple of years ago there was an epidemic of "bid shielding" by bidders using multiple accounts to drive up the minimum bid amount than retract on all but one in the last seconds to bring the price back down to an artificially low amount).
sandyv63
OP1 year agoMy suspicions were correct. However, instead of canceling the fake bid a few hours before the end of the auction, the seller canceled the fake bid as the auction was ending. This is a huge scam on eBay but since eBay makes money, it goes on. Defend these scam sellers all you want; they are hurting honest sellers. Almost all of the sellers in this category (minerals/crystals) are from China. They’ve driven out other sellers who can’t compete. They also sell a lot of fakes. The thing is, these sellers are manipulating the prices through shill bidding and other manipulative tactics (like canceling their shill bids when another bidder doesn’t come along to bid the item up) that eBay cannot or will not stop. Spend some time watching and participating in these auctions and it becomes so obvious. The patterns are there, to the point where I was able to successfully predict the outcome of this auction. All these last minute canceled bids are nonsense. These sellers are doing it with impunity now because they can. So now I’m going to do what I’m sure so many others have done. I’m going to avoid eBay. Eventually these sellers are going to manipulate themselves out of business.