Ebay Clarification Needed.

Tried to bid for a stamp at ebay which started with $0.99. My last bid was $14.00.Just a minute or less before bidding ended another bidder bid the stamp for $25.00 and won the bid. About 48 hours later the stamp was back in auction with a starting bid of $0.99 again. Am wondering if the bidder who won the bid was the seller himself who found the last bid not high enough do his expectation and bid high to get the stamp back or someone else other than the bidder won it and put it back to auction.Since I am quite new to the ebay bidding,am just trying to understand the pros and cons. Thanks.

Do you have an item number for the auction listing?

Look on the right hand side below the main information.

The two things I can think of are: Original bidder may have backed out for some reason, or the Seller is offering a second stamp using the first scan. Check what buyers remarks are; that may hold a clue.

There are sellers that will do that. Once upon a time ebay let us see who we were bidding against and we could get a better idea that we were dealing with sellers that do this. They stopped this when they thought people were making too many side deals and cutting ebay out of their commission. It was not unusual to get emails from guys after you lost an auction offering to sell you a similar stamp.You can report your suspicion to ebay, but if he is a power seller generating income for ebay it is unlikely they will look into it. ebay allows multiple ID's. I have one I use for buying and another for selling. I know of a seller that would cancel auctions on the last day on a regular basis if the bids were not to his liking. He would tell ebay that that the stamp was lost or damaged. He did this so often ebay restricted his ability to do that any more. I would not be suprised if he now has multiple ID's or friends bidding his stuff up, although I have no proof of that. He is a shooting star power seller and can get away with a lot. I won't bid on his auctions anymore and I won't identify him either. My best advise is to look at the feedback and look to see how many auctions were ended early. If either look out of line, don't bid.

If your highest bid was $14 then at least two bidders would be required to bid it up to $25. If a single bidder had bid, whether a "shill" bid from the seller or not, it would only have moved up to the next bidding increment, and would have ended at £14.50 or something like that.

I agree with stampgal .. I have not seen that kind of a jump-up increment with just a single late bidder ... there had to have been two ... or, is it possible Selva was bidding on a "reserve" auction? I have not even looked at such an auction in a long time, but my recollection is that ebay would list the highest bid, even if it did not meet reserve (and therefore would eventually be declared a "no bid.") ... Perhaps this item had a reserve of $25; Selva was at $14 .. .but someone came in at the end and clicked the minimum reserve price.

Would not be sure exactly what happened as this is the first few times am bidding in ebay. Still trying to learn the pros and cons.

A lot of bids can pop up in the final seconds.

When an item has ended, if you open the item you will see the winning bid amount. Next to this in brackets you will see the number of bids. Click on the number of bids and you will see the amount of each bid (only the 1st and last character of the bidder name is displayed).