Ebay Underbidder Forced To Stop

Good message to get from an ebay underbidder or not?

underbidder forced to stop bidding on your items .top bidder has made 473 bids in last 30 days of which 120 ie ,26% has solely been on your items

I don't quite get it. This is from the underbidder? Or from ebay?

It looks slightly suspect - when they say 26% has been "solely" on your items - what does the word "solely" mean? It's just 26% on your items - inaccurate wording like that always makes me wonder.

I am with Ringo. This is very confusing

Message came from a bidder who lost every time he bids because he bids to low, I don't know how he worked out the 26%? But its definitely a confusing message which is why I asked here.

Maybe the underbidder means he was "forced" by himself to stop because he could never win. He seems to be saying that the top bidder is a shill, although I am not saying that was happening with your items.

I have several big spending bidders who just have to win the auctions they go for, when they start bidding against each other, many others just can't win, some of my stamped Swiss covers 1950s have been going for top dollar, let alone a letter that sold over $400 the other day. So I think this bidder is giving up because the competition is to great. He can't win so he stops altogether.

Now that makes perfect sense to me.

Perhaps: "I (an unsuccessful bidder) shall stop bidding on your auctions because they are (too) often won by the same person, so I am wasting too much time on my unsuccessful bidding".

S/he has courteously left open the question of whether you have attracted an aggressive bidder, or built yourself a shill.

As someone who would rather be unpacking goodies than clicking for bargains, I have been known to just step on the lots I want (bid a very large increment over the current high bid), and let any resulting modest overpayment be my convenience fee. That having been said, I only step once and, if overbid, walk away.

Someone is tired of checking & bidding & checking & bidding. They're entitled.

Few things feel better in life - no matter what you are selling - than to find yourself with a repeat customer who really likes your stuff.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

I concur, a politically correct way to suggest that you might be using a shill bidder. So not a great message to receive.
Don

I am in the middle of a strange situation. Right after I listed my weekly auctions a bidder asked if I would let him have one of the collections "buy it now". I thanked him for the offer but told him I didn't do that. He then bid on 40 of my 41 auctions. Occasionally this will happen and a bidder will put in a bunch of low ball bids, but this bidder put in very high bids on everything.

He is still high bidder on the 40 auctions with about 13 hours to go, and what makes it even stranger is that he's only bought 19 things in the last 12 months and only 1 item was stamps. My bids are higher than usual this week but the situation is making me nervous. If you look at this bidders bid record this is what you see:


30-Day Summary
Total bids: 120
Items bid on: 41
Bid activity (%) with this seller: 100% Help
Bid retractions: 0
Bid retractions (6 months): 0

It will be interesting to see what happens.

KRelyea nothing good will happen - it appears to be some sort of "payback" for you refusing to offer a buy it now. If this happened to me, I would cancel all the bidder's bids and put him/her on my blocked bidder list.

http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI....ancelBidShow

duncanvr: Sounds like that bidder has a case of "sour grapes".


A few months ago, I was trying to bid on numerous lots with this one seller on ebay who had really nice cover lots. More often than not I was outbidded by a sniper in the last seconds. It was frustrating, but eventually I won a few lots. Persistence paid off and with each lot lost I learned how to mount a more successful bid. Your disgruntled bidder needs to know that maybe his bids are a bit too conservative and valued a bit more than expected.

Duncanvr. This message hasn't come from ebay. The punctuation is not right (No capital letter on "Top bidder"). Plus too much mathematical detail for an ebay response.

KRelyea. You have an unhappy "potential buyer". I'm not a seller but if I was you, I'd cancel his/her bids as suggested by others.

not an ebay guy but this poses a ??.. bidding on 40 of 41.. is the 41st lot the refused BIN lot?? If so I would suspect that he is using the high bids to block out legit offers (and will retract at last minute???)

It can happen that a deep-pockets bidder nukes multiple items. I frequented one seller on bidStart for about 2 years, liked his material, often successfully bid a reasonable prices.

Then a newcomer jumped in. He would bid on almost every item with an impossibly high bid, way beyond any reasonable value. At first some of us would bid up to what we were willing to pay, always to be outbid. THen as an experiment I tried putting in a much higher bid. Still his original, only bid, was higher.

Once or twice I incrementally bid him up again and again, not because I wanted the item at that price but because by this time his pattern was clear--he was bidding way beyond what he really wanted to pay, on the assumption no one else would bid him past their reasonable top. I started pushing him just to make it cost him heavily, to see if that would chasten him.

Sometimes I would find his limit, way up there, but he was monitoring things and would come back and top my bid. That meant I could push him really high in confidence that I wouldn't get stuck because he was damned sure he was going to have it. I did this perhaps a half-dozen times. He never just let the item go.

So I quit bidding with that seller whenever I saw the stratospheric bidder had already put in a bid. There was no point in it.

In the long run, almost all other bidders dropped out and the stratosphere guy, having driven competition away, would now get things for a song and the seller was the loser.

I describe this in detail to indicate how the underbidder who wrote duncanvr might feel when up against someone who intends to nuke the opposition and doesn't care if that sometimes means paying way more than the lot is worth.

The pattern the underbidder describes need not be the result of shill bidding. Indeed, shill bidders do NOT want to end up the highest bidder. Their task is to push bids up but to back off before the point of no return.

Two years later my Mr. Stratosphere is still bidding on nearly every item offered by the seller I gave up on. If you look at his record on bidStart, he has a thousands of lots purchased from that seller but he also has thousands from one or two other sellers. He must have limitless pockets and does not want to waste time with incremental bidding but wants to bid once and be sure of getting what he's fixed his eye on.

edited for typos

Thanks for all the comments. I can confirm that there is no shill bidding going on in my auctions. I find that is an unfair practice done by some sellers and I simply won't allow shill bidding. All bidding by 100% customers who want the postal history I sell. I have 100 followers in my store and offer good covers & letters every week. I have people who just like winning my items. There are a few that will pay way above what I expect had a 1667 letter just sell over $330 all the bidders are the same bidders who keep coming back. Some bidders have their limits and may only spend less than $5 on a qv red stamped cover but others seem to have no limits on what they spend. I think this is simply a case that this bidder is unhappy he can't win any of the better items because he bids to low. And due to my regular stronger bidders wanting to have the item no matter what it ends for. By the way suggestions of canceling bidders bids I don't do it. If I am worried about mail being lost I'd simply send a large lot of items registered.