possible schill bidder on ebay
carewfan4life
Posts: 27
Buyers need to beware of- boxing1- on ebay. A bidder using -joes27672- is top bidder most of boxing1 auctions. I went thru all of the feedbacks on joes27672 and this guy has made no purchases over $50 yet he has $1800 worth of bids on boxing1's items. Tell me if i am right or wrong. I find it suspicious.
Marc
Marc
0
Comments
1967and 1973 Topps baseball wantlists (any condition) welcome. Once had the #14 ATF 1967 set. Yet another collector like skylaneflyer, gimel1 who made it to the completion of 1967 only to need the money more than the company of 609 close friends.
Looking for oddball Norm Cash and Cleon Jones stuff, and 1956 team cards
I hate to say it, but if you're the type that gets 'caught up' in an auction, and ends up paying more than you were initially prepared to pay, then you have only yourself to blame for letting your emotions get involved in what should be a non-emotional endeavor. As a result, you pay the price for acting irrational. How this could be anyone elses fault but your own has never been clear to me.
First of all, it's against auction rules.
Second, let's say you bid $50 on a card. The second highest bidder (not a shill) bids $30. On ebay, you're now at $31. If the auction ends, you got a good buy, but not a steal. Say the shill comes along and hopes you really want the card, so he bids $45. You just paid $46 when $31 was the true going rate.
You're saying you're OK with that? If so, let me ask you this: do you send the seller the amount of your "top all" bid or only what the final hammer price is?
I thought so.
Nick
Reap the whirlwind.
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Your point re: the fact that shillers eliminate the possibility that the buyer will get something for pennies on the dollar is something I hadn't thought of-- and I should have. For instance, let's say an item that's worth fifty bucks is listed with a starting bid of 10$. One might conceivably put in a snipe for fifty bucks, knowing that he only breaks even (or loses slightly) if he wins the item for his max bid amount, since part of his bid's value comes from those instances where he gets the item for 10,20 or 30 dollars. As such, he's willing to put in a bid of fifty IF that means he'll win the item for below market value a fair percentage of the time. If he had no chance of stealing the item for below market value, he wouldn't have entered the bid in the first place.
As an example, let's say I bid fifty bucks on an '86 FU Bonds PSA 9 (approximately the going rate). Further, let's assume that I figure to win this item for 35$ 5% of the time, 40$ 5% of the time, 45$ 20% of the time and 50$ 40% of the time. Thirty percent of the time I expect to be outbid. Using these numbers, the 'value' of my bid is:
{(15*5)+(10*5)+(5*20)}/ 100, which equals $2.25. This may be an acceptable profit margin, or it may not. But let's say it is. However, if unbeknownst to me I was being shilled, and the shiller was intending on bidding the item up to 50$, then the value of my bid is no greater than zero, which clearly makes it a waste of time.
The obvious counterargument to this, of course, is to say I should only enter a max bid of 45$. But here again, the value of my bid is zero if the auction's being shilled, which puts us back to where we started.
Thanks for pointing this out. Like I said it never occured to me before, although it certainly should have.
By the same logic, however, those prospective bidders who make arrangements not to 'compete' with each other on auctions that interest both parties have NO right to whine about shillers, since this same argument can be applied to the losses suffered by the auction in question.
"All evil needs to triumph is for good men to do nothing."