Shill Bidding

[MicorPaws]

I am the type to not snipe bids in ebay but when I tried to buy a computer for my daughter I always came across bidding where if I post an amount, somehow it automatically goes higher to an exact amount on each system I bid on from same company. It went in intervols as well. After weeks of this I tried numorous ways of bidding and the exact thing happened in sort of a calculated bidding order. I came to the conclusion that these companies are Shill Bidding. So if you think you are bad in any way for sniping think again. The crooked ones are the sellers. I can't thank Gixen enough, I was finally able to purchase a computer for my daughter at a decent, honest price. I put the Gixen widget in my website. Although it isn't a grade1 site, I hope it helps.

~MicroPaws
Buytell.webs.com

[mario]

Thank you, very interesting. I was just explaining today to some friends that shill bidding is another thing that sniping protects you from.

Note that if you notice a pattern (e.g. always the same users bidding on the auction of the same seller, but never winning), you can report this to ebay. They are not happy with sellers/shill bidders as what they do is avoid the reserve price fee. So ebay *will* act on such a report.

[Cupid]

The problem is that, these days, since eBay have obfuscated the identities of the bidders in the bid history, you can not tell who is bidding against you, and so this type of thing is much harder to detect and report.

I agree sniping is the best protection from shill bidding. The only issue it does not address is when sellers place apparently reasonable bids on their auctions, and then offer second chance listings on the items they win with those bids, it is because of a few bad apples that have done this to me that I no longer take Second Chance options at all, I do sometimes suggest that the seller relist the item if they want me to bid on it.
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Mark