Curses! Foiled again!

ChrisN said:
If every bidder would just bid their max, then walk away, there'd be no problem. The problem is the people who up their bid when they see someone else has topped it - a bidding war. I also get really stressed watching the last minute of an auction and waiting to drop my bid in late - my heart literally starts pounding like I've run up a set of stairs! These days, if I'm serious about an item, I'll lodge my maximum bid with a sniper service, then ignore it till after the auction has ended. That way I stick to my maximum bid and I don't contribute to a bidding war. And my heart rate stays relatively normal. :)
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Hi Chris,
What are some of the sniping services that you recommend?
R.J.
 
Ridiculous price. I bought one about a month ago on eBay. I don't remember the exact price but it was around $300, and it was in very good condition.

Dick
 
My truly Evil Ebay days are behind me. If I wanted something really bad, I would find out what the "competition" was also bidding on at the time and drive those items up. Then I would go after the item I wanted, figuring I had strained their reserves. During the last two minutes of an auction that I am high bidder on and really do not want sniped, I used to constantly refresh the page on the high-speed cable connection. Firgure the same image could not be downloaded too many times at once. Kind of like on StarGate-1, dialing the gate out so someone else can't dial in.
 
Brian - hey that's serious stuff :p . Ha!

RJ - I use EZSNIPER . It seems to bid in about the last 5 or 6 seconds of an auction. I've lodged about a dozen bids this way; won a few, lost a few more, but stuck to my maximum bid. I guess the reliability of these services depends on their servers and infrastructure, and one day I'll miss because a server goes down. And I have once missed out when my bid at the last minute was a few cents higher than the highest bid, but didn't clear the margin to the next highest bid that ebay would accept - that was annoying!

One thing to remember is that the winning price is effectively determined by the nearest loser - the selling price is only a bid margin above the second-highest bidder. A few times I've been the second-highest bidder and thought "Gee if I'd only bid another $5 I would have won", but maybe the winner had actually bid another $50! You never know if you don't put your money on the line.
 
ChrisN said:
Brian - hey that's serious stuff :p . Ha!

RJ - I use EZSNIPER . It seems to bid in about the last 5 or 6 seconds of an auction. I've lodged about a dozen bids this way; won a few, lost a few more, but stuck to my maximum bid. I guess the reliability of these services depends on their servers and infrastructure, and one day I'll miss because a server goes down. And I have once missed out when my bid at the last minute was a few cents higher than the highest bid, but didn't clear the margin to the next highest bid that ebay would accept - that was annoying!

One thing to remember is that the winning price is effectively determined by the nearest loser - the selling price is only a bid margin above the second-highest bidder. A few times I've been the second-highest bidder and thought "Gee if I'd only bid another $5 I would have won", but maybe the winner had actually bid another $50! You never know if you don't put your money on the line.
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Thanks, Chris! :p

R.J.
 
Doug said:
Considering an eBay auction as a "game" is I think a losing idea, though fostered by eBay through their use of the word "Win" to describe what the eventual buyer has done... which is actually paying more for something than anyone else would pay!

Sniping can be a way to avoid "playing the game". First, a last-second bid does not give other bidders an opportunity to "play" by responding to your bid. Secondly it does not give YOU the opportunity to bid again, enforcing some discipline. Figure how much you'll pay, bid at the last second, and you know that's your one and final bid. If some other bidder's maximum was higher, so be it; your bid what was right for you.

Some recent eBay purchases have shown me that I'm having problems with item condition. Three cameras have had expensive problems... internal problems from impact, from sitting wet and corroding, and the third now is found to have a fastener come loose inside and break a shaft in the film transport. :( The seller of the corroded item was surprised at that discovery, as he'd bought it on eBay himself and only knew the meter wasn't working. So it's still a gamble, maybe a "game" in that respect.
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It's turning into a crap shoot, Doug. People get their inventory at yard sales, don't know if it works and try to sell it for big bucks. This seller hit the "lottery":
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=7529788575

Do you think this seller knows anything about cameras?
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=64340&item=7541858327

People, who have a lot of repeat business, know what they sell and sell quality stuff seem to do well. For example, I've known this guy since he worked at St. Louis Photo in the 1980s:
http://feedback.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewFeedback&userid=ckejcameras
Craig currently has 100% feedback from 3322 transactions and 2663 members. 659 of those transactions represent repeat business over the last 8 years. I recently asked him what his secret was. Look at his item descriptions. Every description says, return for refund if not satisfied.

eBay could do better a better job with the statistics to make them more meaningful instead of just showing us a feedback "score".

Just my 2¢ worth.

R.J.
 
I watched a Contax G1 body in EBay last week whilst in the UK. I waited until the death knell and placed my bid only to be told that bidding was restricted to UK bidders only - I was there but registered in Oz. If I had planned ahead I might have scored it for under 150 pounds. I recently picked up a IIIA with 1.5 Opton Sonnar for $US299 on Ebay including shipping which was excellent - the meter appears to be no more than a stop out over the range and the three B and W films that I have put through it seem PDG.
 
RObert Budding said:
I really like Henry's CLA's. My IIIa operates perfectly.

RObert
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I heard he's good. I was surprised to see the listing on eBay for his evaluation service. There's only one seller in the Netherlands that I know of who sells CLA'd Contaxes.

R.J.
 
I've seen Henry list the same evaluation service before. Don't think he expects anyone to buy it - he just wants to warn folks. I read a post somewhere (here or pnet) about someone who purchased a "CLA'd" Contax from the eBay seller petrakla. The thing contained a Kiev shutter! The pictures I saw posted even showed petrakla's signature within the camera. Here's a link explaining the whole sordid tale.

http://www.photo.net/neighbor/view-one.tcl?neighbor_to_neighbor_id=204552

Robert
 
Well, that correspondence did get a bit overheated... Unfortunately the listing appears to have been removed from eBay.

 
RObert Budding said:
I've seen Henry list the same evaluation service before. Don't think he expects anyone to buy it - he just wants to warn folks. I read a post somewhere (here or pnet) about someone who purchased a "CLA'd" Contax from the eBay seller petrakla. The thing contained a Kiev shutter! The pictures I saw posted even showed petrakla's signature within the camera. Here's a link explaining the whole sordid tale.

http://www.photo.net/neighbor/view-one.tcl?neighbor_to_neighbor_id=204552

Robert
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Hi Robert,

Someone from Japan placed the first bid.

R.J.
 
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