Why do I Even Bother?...

69topps8

...to bookmark auctions that I don't intend to bid on? It mucks up my bookmark folder and probably causes me to lose some bookmarks of auctions I really plan to bid on. Perhaps this is the male version of a shopoholic?

Case in point - I've bookmarked several 1973 PSA 9 commons that are currently at a reasonable price but a bidder with very deep pockets is top bidder. I usually only bid on 8's unless I can pick up a 9 for a reasonable price. Since this bidder always bids at least 2x more than I'm willing to pay, I doubt I'll ever even place a bid on the 15 or so cards I have bookmarked.

Does anyone else suffer from this disease?

pinhigh

Well, not exactly, but something very similar. I usually track every 1953 Bowman card, as best as I can. Ofcourse this doesn't make for a very clean Auction Favorites folder, but I have attempted to organize it somewhat. I have divided my auctions folder into two sections - the top for ongoing auctions and the bottom for auctions that I have won. The top is organized so that the auctions are in the order they are ending, with the auctions closest to ending at the top. Then, in order to distinguish between those that I am just tracking and those that I intend to bid on, I just add a couple a couple of asterisk (*) to the beginning of the label. This way, I can easily see when the auctions that I intend to bid on have changed and I can tell the difference between those I am tracking and those that I intend to bid on at a glance.

Do you use the track auction function of your browser, or do you just bookmark them?

mcastaldi

69topps> I use three methods to avoid cluttering my bookmarks-
1) Use the Watch This Item function in My eBay. This will also display the current price for each item, but you can only look at 20 items.

2) I will often place an insulting bid when I'm sure I will be outbid. i.e. bidding $9.99 for 1975 PSA9s. Just enough to say I had a bid on the item. Then, you can also look at items being bid on by a given user. I will then pull up this page for my eBay ID. Then these items will show up on the "Items bid on by: mcastaldi" page. Then I just bookmark that page. Even if the bid you enter does not eclipse the current top bid, it will still show up here because you bid on the item. And wit this you can track as many items as you want.
So, for example, the items I'm currently bidding on can be found at -
http://cgi3.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewBidItems&userid=mcastaldi&sort=3&page=1&rows=25&completed=0&all=1

When you get to this web site, find "mcastaldi" in the web address and replace it with your eBay ID. On a side note, I've also found this to be useful for tracking the other "players" for cards your interested in. They may well see some stuff you miss. I must caution you, though. While it's a small possibility, and it's never happened to me, there is a small chance that your insulting bid will win.

This information - items you are bidding on - is also available via your My eBay page, but I like this method because many times I don't feel like logging in or scrolling through the completed items to see the ones that are still active.

3) I will bookmark the "Items for sale by:" pages for the eBay sellers with which I do the most business. For the years I collect, there's generally a small number of sellers which provide the overwhelming majority of the cards for sale.

Mike

acowa

To add to Mike...I use esnipe.com. I place a bid of X $ and at the end of the auction it tells me whether I won or lost and provides a link to the auction after it finishes. No muss...no fuss.

Regards,


Alan

Vargha

Cards that you are only interested in seeing what price they close for can be looked up using the "Search" function and then clicking on the "Completed Items" option to look up the prices for the last 3 weeks.


(Grammar error . . . non-parallel sentence construction)

69topps8

Thanks for all the tips. I'm aware of these features and do use some of them. I should use the "watch this item" feature more frequently.