Is This A Shill?

[Gordon Henderson]

On Tue, 1 May 2018, Hagstrom, Paul via cctalk wrote:

>> On May 1, 2018, at 6:06 PM, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>>
>> Personally, I find all of this hilarious.  ebay has been shady for as long
>>
>> as I have watched it.  I gave up seriously bidding on "auctions" years ago.
>>
>> Seems every time I bid and ended out the top bidder it would stay that
>>
>> way till the auction ended and then suddenly someone beat me by a
>>
>> dollar.
>
> That's just the way eBay works.  You'll win anyway if your bid is higher 
> than the other person's snipe.  eBay auto-bids only whatever it takes to 
> beat you, so one increment higher.  You'll notice that if you bid $1000 
> on something with a $10 opening bid, eBay displays this as a bid of $10, 
> and the time runs out with no other bids, you pay $10.  And if someone 
> else bids $20, they lose to your new automatically placed bid of $21.
>
> I don't think there's any advantage to not sniping, since bidding calls 
> attention to a thing and does encourage people to bid it up even if your 
> top snipe bid would beat them.  But this is just basically how the eBay 
> game is played.  I used to snipe by hand, now I usually let a bot do it. 
> It bids in the last couple of seconds, so it can look just like what you 
> describe.  Sniping wouldn't work if auctions didn't have a hard end 
> time, but since they do, that's how it works and they state it all quite 
> clearly.  Maybe sometime something shady happens though I've yet to see 
> any convincing evidence of it myself (only people claiming it happens 
> all the time, all the time), but sniping is not itself shady.

This.

I use a program called esniper - sometimes I win, sometimes I lose, but 
when I lose thats OK, because the item sold for more than I was willing to 
pay.

Recently however I was unable to use esniper (ebay changed something that 
broke it) so put in my max. bid the old fashioned way. I was winning for 
a day or so.

Then something very odd happened: very close to the end of the auction a 
brand new bidder came in and bid 100x the going rate - that immediately 
maxed out my bid - however the seller more or less immediately cancelled 
their bid. They waited 10 minutes then did it again, and again the seller 
cancelled their bid. My guess is that they wanted to see if I'd upped my 
bid. Then a sniper came in and bid more than me at the last minute. I did 
feel cheated there though and will never bid on items from that seller 
again because I felt they somehow had a hand in this bidding but I can't 
prove it, but then again, it's a sellers market and ebay don't care 
because they get money from the sale anyway.

Due to the speed the bid was cancelled I'm more or less convinced it was 
the seller doing this and not the winning bidder, however it did let the 
winner see my max. bid so may have influenced them. Who knows.

So snipe, "by hand" or with a program and if everyone does it, then it 
becomes the same as blind auction then it becomes fair again.

Until the seller withdraws the auction 5 minutes before the end because 
"the listing was incorrect", and re-lists it, trying to get more.

-Gordon