[meteorite-list] Is EBAY bidding fixed?

[valparint at aol.com]

Greg, can you supply an ebay listing number where this has occurred? It 
would help clarify your question.

Ebay introduced a new policy several months ago that does have a very 
negative impact on bidding, IMHO. On auctions that go over $200 bidders 
can no longer see who they are bidding against. Ebay replaces user IDs 
with "bidder 1", "bidder 2", etc. This makes it next to impossible to 
detect shill bidding. They justify this with a bunch of crap about 
protecting the ebay community.

I found it very useful to know who the competition was for a particular 
item and it was educational to look at the bidders won-auction histories. 
Sometimes researching this led to new sellers of interest. No more.

I wrote several emails to ebay about this and got the standard party-line 
canned-response about how "ebay is protecting the community from 
phishing". They didn't bother to respond to my last missile.

When you think about if from ebay's point of view, they are most 
interested in keeping sellers happy and driving up prices because that's 
how they make money. They pay lip service to bidders by promising honest 
auctions and providing a process for dispute resolution but after a 
certain point it becomes a money loser for them. Their resolution process 
is akin to dealing with the IRS.

As a bidder, you have to know what your top number is and bid it. Doesn't 
really matter if you bid it now or bid it later because ebay will adjust 
your bid to go only as high as it needs to.

Paul Swartz



>        To all,
>
>     I am new to EBAY and to meteorite collecting.  I have purchased 13
> meteorites total.  I've gotten most of them by bidding on EBAY.  I've
> noticed that many times someone will bid for an item and continually bid
> the
> item up even though nobody is bidding against them.  They may start out 
> by
> bidding $10.00 for an item, then the same person raises the price to
> $30.00,
> then $50.00, then $80.00, etc., etc.  They artificially and 
> unnecessarily
> raise the price so that the item finally sells for a *much* higher price
> than it would have gone for if this hadn't been done.
>     Either the bidder is a moron or he is working with the seller to up
> the
> price.
>     Can anyone explain this phenomenon to me?
>
>     Greg Lindh