Item lost for unknown reason

[astefano]

Hi, I am an happy Gixen user and never had any problem with it.
This time however I lost even if my bid was 15€ higher than the last bid.

Can´t explain it.

It was ebay 192319816106. It was sold at 76€ even if my bid was over 90 and all I got was "BID UNDER ASKING PRICE" message.

(I´d have liked to post an image of my message but I do not know how to do it)

Please help ? Thank you!

[Cupid]

There was a bid of EUR 166.00 that was retracted 8 seconds before the auction finished at 9 Oct 2017 at 9:31:44AM BST, look on the bids page here;

[juangrande]

Very interesting! I learned something, Mark.

Apparently the high bidder, i***y(1260), bid more than EUR 91 so that when his alternate bid-shielding ID, a***t(2), bid EUR 166, the EUR 91 bid that astefano made was rejected as "BID UNDER ASKING PRICE" and not even recorded on eBay. Wow.

If anyone reading this is still interested, this is how the bid shielding worked. For purposes of illustration, let's say that i***y(1260)'s actual bid was EUR 165. (We can't tell what it actually was, but presumably it was near the retracted bid in order to block legitimate bids.)

Then, since the bid increment at that level is EUR 1.00, the bidding history before a***t(2)'s bid was retracted would have looked like this:

[Cupid]

Unfortunately, I don't think a lower offset would have helped because, in order to avoid too many unnecessary requests to Ebay I think Gixen does a check, prior to initiating the whole sniping process, that the price is such that it is worthwhile to proceed with the snipe.

This is why if you update your snipes page, by pushing the 'Add' button without entering any details, in the last couple of minutes of an auction, you occasionally find a 'BID UNDER ASKING PRICE' status is provided for the snipe before the auction is even completed. Perhaps with the new integrated sniping system this extra step should be disabled... Perhaps Mario already has?... But, if so, he hasn't reported that he has done so here, yet.

The only real remedy is to get the users that use such tactics banned from using Ebay, and I think that will only happen if people report them for doing it.

In my opinion there is also a lot more that Ebay could, and should, be doing to automatically detect this behaviour and sanction all accounts involved in it.
_________________
Mark

[Gixen]

[Astefano]

Wow it took me a while to understand this one.
So if I get it right until 8 seconda to the end the bid was (say) 165 and suddenly it dropped to 76 as soon as the one at 166 was cancelled.
Wow that was clever. The seller must have loved to see this happening live. Yes I will definitely report this to eBay.
Thank you so much!
PS was it not once impossible to retract bids within the last 12 hours before the end? Do I remember it wrong?

[Cupid]

You are correct that it was impossible to retract earlier bids within the last few hours of an auction.

In fact it may still be the case, however, it is now possible to retract bids that have only been placed within the past hour... This opens the loophole that this buyer is exploiting.
_________________
Mark

[juangrande]

Thanks, Mark, for your explanation of why having a smaller offset would not have helped.

For the record, here is the link to eBay's bid retraction rules:
http://pages.ebay.com/ebaymotors/help/buyerguide/bidding-retract.html

I actually tried to find a way to alert eBay about this auction, and was unable to find a way to do it. eBay makes it very difficult to report this sort of thing by its many filters.

In fact, the OP would not be able to report it, since their bid was not even recorded and thus they would not be recognized as a buyer.

Alerting the seller in the hope they would report it appears the only avenue to report this to eBay.

If I'm missing something, Mark, please let us know.
_________________
John

If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
--- Yogi Berra

[Cupid]

In the UK, I use 'Chat with us' that I access here:

https://ocsnext.ebay.co.uk/ocs/cusr?query=1456&levelHierarchy=1a1a1

In the US the equivalent appears to be:

https://ocsnext.ebay.com/ocs/cusr?query=1456&levelHierarchy=1a1a1

You get to these via the 'Contact Us' links on the Ebay home page

Perhaps someone also needs to start a campaign about this on the Ebay discussion forums, they do occasionally take notice of that if enough people start complaining about something.
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Mark

[astefano]

Hi, Just tested the chat with ebay. Nope.
Thanks anyway... (

---

Jomar23:09 PM
Thank you so much for patiently waiting. I'm finished checking your report and I can see that there's no shillbidding practice that is going on in this auction. Sometimes, what appears to be Shill Bidding may actually be legitimate bidding and, if we find there's not enough evidence of Shill Bidding, which is the case here, we do not take action against any of the reported accounts.
In many cases, a bidder enters a maximum amount for a bid and the system then bids for them until their maximum is reached. If you see that you are automatically been outbid, this is usually the reason: the system is bidding for the other member.

23:10 PM
Ok Jomar. Thanks for checking this out for me anyway

[Cupid]

You can take a horse to water... but you can't make it drink.

Buy the way, it isn't 'shill' bidding that they should have been investigating (or that you reported, no doubt ?), that is where a seller bids on their own items, in order to push the price up by getting others to bid against them in order to try to win. I agree there is no suspicion of that happening here, the seller was the one that lost out the most, due to this activity, they certainly would not have done this themself...

No, this is 'bid shielding', which is the use of two or more buyer accounts in order to manipulate the final price of the auction to the advantage of that buyer.
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Mark

[juangrande]

It's frustrating when eBay personnel don't even know the difference between bid shielding and shill bidding. Perhaps it would have helped Jomar to be given a link to this thread.
_________________
John

If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
--- Yogi Berra

[Astefano]

well I did not give the direct link to this post (I suspect that sniping is not a very welcome practice by eBay either...) but copy-pasted most of what was said here.

Unfortunately it did not help.

[Cupid]

Sniping is not a practice that Ebay provide on their own platform, however they do recognise it 'as part of the Ebay experience'...

After all, every price rise on an auction generates extra revenue for them.

So, going forward, I don't think there is any harm for users to reveal their use of this service to Ebay staff.

Thank you for trying, that was very public spirited of you, something, thankfully, we do not appear to be lacking here on Gixen.

We can do no more than share our observations and knowledge with Ebay... If they choose not to heed our recommendations then ultimately it will the Ebay platform that suffers from being bought into disrepute by a small minority of its users.
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Mark