Bid retractions - WTF???

[+jgkspsx]

I put lowball bids on a ton of Sega CD games from a seller I've bought from before. I got a couple bid retraction notices after being outbid on items, which seemed strange. 

 

By last night, I got a notification that I was outbid on every one, and I breathed a sigh of relief that I wouldn't have to pay for them. Then at 9 this morning this wad of emails ends up in my inbox:

 

 

Surprise surprise, all of today's retracted bids were from a now-deleted account that **exclusively** bid on items from this seller: https://www.ebay.com/bmgt/ViewBidderProfile?&mode=1&item=274902569468&bidtid=2461637165017

 

The two earlier retracted bids were from a still-extant account that looks legitimate: https://www.ebay.com/bmgt/ViewBidderProfile?&mode=1&item=274902437801&bidtid=2460633813017

 

I've had concerns about this seller as I accidentally bid too high on a PSVita game from them before and it was bid up to a much, much too high price ($35 above normal). I paid it but made a mental note to be wary with this person. Now it's really looking sketchy.

 

If it was the seller's doing, what is the point of doing this? Is it like blackjack where you try to bid it up but not too much so you go over?

 

If it's not the seller's doing, was the goal to determine the current maximum bid so that another real account could snipe it?

[kennybrooks]

I would blame this more on ebay's failure to follow its own rules.  If you have a gut feeling about this seller, I would go with that. I have had idiots do this to my items in the past so it would just be that, for whatever inane reason they did it for.

[MrVideoGames]

I’m not sure what you mean by “accidentally bid too high.”  If you had an accident then retract the bid otherwise why aren’t you bidding up to the highest amount that you’re willing to pay and then no more?

[Mayhem]

And this is why I always snipe...

[carlsson]

Using sock puppet accounts or asking friends to bid has been going on for over 10 years now, but the bid retraction might be a more recent thing. Did this mean that you won the items for your low-ball bids, or just someone else inbetween your bid and the highest one drew the short stick? If the seller put this into system, they better check what is the second highest offer before they retract the highest one.

[+jgkspsx]

I don’t retract bids. My feedback is perfect and I want to keep it that way. If I bid an order of magnitude too high that would be one thing, but I am on average well ahead of the market rates, so I can afford to let the seller win the one time.

[mumbai]

23 minutes ago, carlsson said:

Using sock puppet accounts or asking friends to bid has been going on for over 10 20+ years now...

FTFY.

[carlsson]

Aha, eBay was founded in 1995. While I was on the Internet back then, I'm not sure if I visited auction sites like that before Y2K, and seriously didn't begin trading until around 2007-08. I would assume that in the very early years, shill bidders were not quite as common as most items weren't sought after and the user base was smaller, but for sure it could be a 20 year old tradition living on.

[+jgkspsx]

A number of these auctions have ended and many of them ended way over the market price. (A copy of Final Fight CD, which sells for <$150, went for over $700!) 

 

I don’t know what the seller’s magic is, but if it’s not getting bidding war assistance, if I ever manage to start selling my extras again I’m gonna have to try to figure it out.

[Rik1138]

Something I've seen a seller or two do: they keep bidding on their auction until they are the winning bidder so they can find out your max bid.

So, lets say you bid $100.  The seller using a fake/friends account to bid $200 and is now the winning bidder at $101 (or whatever the increment is).

Then, they cancel their bid (which should drop your winning bid back down to one increment of the next bidder below you), and use another fake/friends account to bid $99.

That leaves you the winner, at your max bid.

It's kind of obvious when they do that though, as the 'second' bidder is always conveniently just under your max bid after the previous 'winner' cancels...

 

Now if your max was $100, and you got outbid, then the winner canceled and you won at, say, $20 because the next bid below you was only $19, then I'm not sure what is going on there...    It's also possible someone just wanted to see what the max bids were, and then cancelled once they had that information...

[+jgkspsx]

I thought that might be the case, but I ended up not winning any of these auctions, and some of them ended up going for 5x the market price (and I’m not talking about 5x$10, I’m talking about 5x$150 @_@)

[Asaki]

I've had some weird stuff like that too, but lately it's been "you did not win because the item is no longer for sale".

Which I assume is because they got a better offer outside of eBay and cancelled the auction.

[TheGameCollector]

I typically won't even look at or try to get items that aren't "buy it now" anymore. It causes too much anxiety.

[Mayhem]

21 hours ago, jgkspsx said:

A number of these auctions have ended and many of them ended way over the market price. (A copy of Final Fight CD, which sells for <$150, went for over $700!) 

 

I don’t know what the seller’s magic is, but if it’s not getting bidding war assistance, if I ever manage to start selling my extras again I’m gonna have to try to figure it out.

It's happening elsewhere in some of the other collecting circles I'm in. Allowing for the fact the Covid spike is a genuine phenomenon for prices, what myself and a few others think is happening is certain people manipulating the end price of various auctions. Genuine auctions. but no one pays. Then they try to sell the same item privately, and can say "hey look these are the recent end prices on eBay, I'll selling it for under that" when the cited end prices were never "genuine" in the first place.

[Atari_Bill]

2 hours ago, Mayhem said:

It's happening elsewhere in some of the other collecting circles I'm in. Allowing for the fact the Covid spike is a genuine phenomenon for prices, what myself and a few others think is happening is certain people manipulating the end price of various auctions. Genuine auctions. but no one pays. Then they try to sell the same item privately, and can say "hey look these are the recent end prices on eBay, I'll selling it for under that" when the cited end prices were never "genuine" in the first place.

Exactly!  I’ve thought his for a while now.  Especially bad in the graded market.  

[+jgkspsx]

On 8/19/2021 at 10:27 PM, Rik1138 said:

Now if your max was $100, and you got outbid, then the winner canceled and you won at, say, $20 because the next bid below you was only $19, then I'm not sure what is going on there...   

This (not this drastic) has actually happened to me a couple times. Got items for WELL below the market price. I felt guilty even though I had nothing to do with it.

[+OLD CS1]

Yeah, this is normal.  Weird, but normal.  I won an auction for an item, and after the item was shipped I received bid retraction notifications on the item.  Then I received a notice from eBay that the account had been deleted and my bids had been automatically retracted.  It went on to state that since the item had been paid and shipped I would receive special handling on a complaint should the item not arrive or not arrive as promised.  Everything worked out fine.

[+jgkspsx]

Sucks for the seller, though. Yeesh.

[Mikebloke]

On 8/20/2021 at 7:51 AM, TheGameCollector said:

I typically won't even look at or try to get items that aren't "buy it now" anymore. It causes too much anxiety.

I'm still a huge sniper but things I know a rough price for I'm happy to try a offer or the occasional buy it now on a non auction item. 

[+jgkspsx]

Update: a BUNCH of games I bid on and lost have been relisted. At least several are the same items because they have very similar characteristics. 

For instance here is Lords of Thunder ending at $333, which is more than the market rate: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Lords-of-Thunder-Sega-CD-1995-Complete-Tested-Authentic-/274902437801
 

And here it is relisted for $200: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Lords-of-Thunder-Sega-CD-1995-Complete-Tested-Authentic-/274932785046

 

This back insert’s contours are hard to exactly reproduce: 

 

 

Likewise, here is a game that went for about the market rate:

 

That exact damage couldn’t happen twice, that’s for sure.

 

The most ridiculously overpriced item I saw, something that sells for $80 going for $350, has not been relisted. At least yet.

 

Maybe he has bad luck with buyers. Maybe he doesn’t show condition well enough. (He didn’t do a very good job showing compression damage to the case insert of a Wii game I bought, and a Gamecube game I bought was super scratched up, possibly in transit - thankfully a cheap one.)

 

Not all of his items end excessively high, but I would be very careful with bidding on items from knidan07 from Plano TX. There is something funny going on with his auctions.

 

EDIT: or maybe he has so much good stuff he attracts weirdness. This seems like one of the buyers responsible for relisted items here. It’s hard to say. Just don’t bid too much, is what I’m saying.

 

[+davidcalgary29]

On 8/19/2021 at 10:08 AM, carlsson said:

Aha, eBay was founded in 1995. While I was on the Internet back then, I'm not sure if I visited auction sites like that before Y2K, and seriously didn't begin trading until around 2007-08. I would assume that in the very early years, shill bidders were not quite as common as most items weren't sought after and the user base was smaller, but for sure it could be a 20 year old tradition living on.

I just checked, and it seems that I set up my account (and started bidding) on 3 April 2000. And yes, shill bidders have always been a common feature of this site. I bid almost exclusively on those weird post-Atari-pre-SD Card A8 items that were floating around at the time, like kludged hard drives and modded XF551s, and was shafted a number of times.