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I was high bidder on an item and at the last second the seller outbid me and immediately reposted the item. Is this allowed by EBay?
7 comments
shipscript
·3 years agoSellers are not able to bid on their own auctions. If you suspect the seller used a different account to do so, you can report the seller. Is there a reason that you suspect a seller would undermine your high bid?
810donna
OP2 years agoshipscript
·2 years ago@810donna
The seller of the religious medals has sold many 3-pound lots. You will notice that the newly listed lot has a different photo and a different lot number in the title. The lot on which you were bidding was actually sniped in the last seconds by two different buyers and was won by the highest bidder, which was quite a bit higher than your highest bid. There were 10 different bidders on the lot. Bidder names are hidden from all but the seller, although you can see your own name in the bidder list.
The same tactic holds true for the coin listing. You were high bidder within the last half hour of the auction, but that still allowed plenty of time for someone else to bid higher and to bid at the very last moment (called sniping).
You may want to become familiar with automatic bidding (proxy bidding), where you would enter the most you are willing to pay. eBay would bid on your behalf only when someone outbids you, and only by enough to outbid the other. Your automatic bid may never meet your maximum bid if no one bids against your displayed bid; or, someone could exceed your maximum and you would have to bid again if you want to stay in the game.
When two people bid the same amount, the earliest bid wins over the later bid, and this can happen frequently with automatic bidding, which can be seen by the timestamp of the bids. The key to winning with automatic bidding is to bid early and bid your max.
https://www.ebay.com/help/buying/bidding/automatic-bidding?id=4014
810donna
OP2 years agoThank you for your response.
I understand fully how eBay works. Even though the last bids for both lots were higher than mine, my experience with buying from eBay has been that bids incrementally increase. They don't jump from $75 to $127.50 without more bids leading up to the final bid. It's clear from the bidding records that no incremental bids were logged for the medals but they were for the pennies. That being said, the winning bidder of the medals should have gotten the lot for $76.00 - not 127.50.
Nevertheless, my issue was that both the medals and pennies were immediately reposted on the original seller's page, (both having different lot numbers but with the exact pictures). If you look closely at the pictures, you can see they are the same so unless they are using the same pictures for all of their posts, then it appears that they just didn't want to sell at such a low price.
It is what it is...........
Regards.
shipscript
·2 years ago@810donna
eBay's proxy bidding can be confusing at times. The price jumped from $75 to $127 because both snipers put in high bids. Had only one put in a high bid, the increment would only have been as high as the lower bid. But with both bidding high, one bid was forced to outbid the other's maximum bid. There would be no need for incremental bidding between two proxy bids as they were the only two players remaining.
Please look at this page of sold items:
Religious Lot of 3 lbs. Catholic Medals & More - Read Description
The seller has already sold 10 of these lots. They are all different. Each photo has a slip of paper on top of the pile to identify the lot number. None of the photos from the new listing matches any of the photos from the ended listing.
See this page of sold Wheat pennies. Look at the prices for which each of those 13 lots sold — anywhere between $37 and $55. And they all have the exact same photos. The seller states in the description that The picture is for reference only. So the seller is reusing the same photos for each bulk listing and states that in the listing.
If the seller had been bamboozling the bidders of those 10 sold medals listings and those 13 sold penny listings over the past couple of months, one would expect to see something about it in the seller's feedback. But for some reason, all those buyers think this seller is one great guy.
810donna
OP2 years agoThank you for the clarification.
Have a blessed day.
shipscript
·2 years agoYou are very welcome, and thank you for sticking in there. Perhaps you will still find a desirable lot from that same seller by bidding a higher proxy bid.