eBay

yutopia7 · ‎11-19-2023

eBay says people who retract a bid may gain an unfair advantage by finding the other bidders max bid. I believe that’s happening to me. As soon as my bid was outbid the person who outbid me retracted all their bids.

now my understanding is, the same person can bid again and possibly snipe the auction? Really? And eBay is not going to do anything about this?? They say people with valid excuse can retract their bids but I feel people can just lie and get away with this all the time

woodland_gnome · ‎11-19-2023

Although the "strategy" behind doing so is fatally flawed, in that to win you need to not only beat the current high bidder, but any new bidders after (or slightly before: the countdown is not real-time and information on a new bid--which does NOT include its hidden maximum in any event--can be several seconds in being reflected on it) the bidder went through that totally unnecessary (and more likely to get him/herself blocked by the seller) retraction.

And unless the seller blocks him/her (or s/he runs into some other limit in placing the new bid) s/he can bid again. The main valid reason for retraction obligates the bidder to bid again after the retraction to CORRECT a typo in entering the bid amount by rebidding the amount s/he intended to type in.

And unfortunately eBay seems to do nothing to enforce the rule against lying to retract. It eliminated retractions in certain trading card categories a couple of years ago because "bid shielding" was getting out of hand (thus driving down prices and therefore eBay's cut of the price), but they can't bother to even set up bots to detect whether the seller has revised the listing after the bid or to require rebidding and comparing the amounts of the old and new bid to determine the likelihood of a typo. It is not super-rare to see bidders with hundreds of retractions in the past year.