posted on March 11, 2001 08:33:54 AM new
It looks very similar to VRANE's POWERBOMB feature which cancels all bids and ends your auction, except the VIRTUAL RESERVE does it automatically one hour prior to end, right? It appears completely within ebay's rules and regulations to be ebay-legal. May not be "fair" to bidders. Of course, life is not fair. I deal with a lot of repeat buyers, and would not treat them so roughly in the auctions I run. My buyers, are folks I know, thru my hobby, and have met and shook hands with many..I feel the experience of having a bid canceled and auction ended early on many auctions would damage a sellers reputation. You could use it once in a great while. Perhaps you have an item that COULD bring a large sum, and you wanted to list it, with a low starting price, and heavily promote the item, with yellow highlight, all the bells and whistles. If you expected the item to reach say, 200 bucks and it only got to 150, then maybe....but I would be tempted to do the canceling and closure manually or with the powerbomb.
posted on March 11, 2001 08:43:21 AM new
And the thing is...ethical considerations aside...you would knock off the folks planning to snipe. Your auction might have sold into the stratosphere, but you'd never know.
Often, the most serious buyers of all are snipers, in my experience.
posted on March 11, 2001 09:14:13 AM new
When they say ,"VR will attempt to snipe your own auction using the amount you set" they must be thinking the definition of "snipe" is something other than "placing a bid in the last few seconds of the auction." Otherwise they should call this the Virtual Shill tool. They gotta mean that Vrane, a few minutes before your auction ends (or at whatever time you set), will look and see what the high bid is, and will cancel bids & end the auction if it's not high enough.
On the surface it would seem to be eBay legal, but it also seems to set the scene for fee avoidance. I've got a proxy bid in of $100 but my competition has only bid the price up to $50. The seller wanted at least $75 for the item but Vrane, only seeing the $50 current bid, cancels the auction and shuts me out. If I'm the high bidder and suddenly find the auction cancelled, it seems like it would be pretty natural for me to email the seller to find out "what's up?" And for him to email me back and say, "Sorry, but I just couldn't let this item go for $50." And for me to respond, "Well I had a proxy bid of $100, would you sell it to me for that?" Basically, the same set-up as a seller using an impossibly high reserve price, then selling to the high bidder anyway. Except I'm a little more motivated to initiate contact with the seller just to find out what's going on, why was my bid cancelled, why did you end the auction early?
I've heard it often repeated that some bidders don't like reserves and while I believe it, I've never understood it. A reserve price has never put me off bidding on an item. To me a reserve is just a legal, above-board way for a seller to put a bid in on his own item, and beating it is just the same as outbidding any other competing bidder.
Using the Virtual Reserve I think does bidders (and the seller) a disservice because the bidders don't know the seller is expecting a specific price for the item. If I know the seller has a specific price he needs to get for an item, a reserve tells me so, and I may be inclined to keep bidding till the reserve price is met. At least I have a chance to meet it. The Virtual Reserve "pulls the carpet out from under me" as another poster has stated, and while being "eBay legal," seems to me to be a fairly tacky way of doing business.
posted on March 11, 2001 02:54:38 PM newToke
My thoughts exactly. I have had items shoot up tremendously in the last couple of minutes of bidding. I don't fully "get this" tool.
I remember an item I had that stayed under 100.00 for a week and in the last couple of minutes sold for over 500.00. It ain't over till the clock stops. I can also remember items that tripled with 2 seconds on the clock. What happens is that there is 2 good snipes placed in the last seconds and the highest proxy wins!
BTW - Hi
posted on March 11, 2001 04:26:57 PM new
Just had to pop in say - Howdy Nobs!
Hope all is well with you & yours.
I also agree with you & Toke. I've had numerous items skyrocket in price within the last 5 minutes of an auction. The one that sticks out in my mind the most, you helped ship for me. It went from $1,600-2,400 in the last 3 minutes of the auction.
posted on March 11, 2001 10:33:15 PM new
Though the tool says "snipe" it is really doing an automated comparison between the bid the seller wants and the bid on the auction. It is not actually placing a bid - so violates NO ebaY rules. It compares the price, and then acts like the auction bomb tool to cancel bids and end the auction. Though it might annoy buyers who thought they were getting a deal, it would be no different than those buyers who were trying to force early bids by saying they could and would cancel the item at any time if there appeared to be no interest.
ebaY's reserve fee is a protection racket on ebaYs part - very akin to the old Mafia protection racket. You need a reserve fee to protect yourself against ebaYs unreliable system, and then they charge you for the protection against a problem that is their fault. I see nothing wrong in using this as an alternative to ebaYs unethical fee, though it probably should be used in great moderation. This just automates what sellers can and DO now.
It also shows what an incredibly brilliant programmer and thinker Vrane.Com is. Though I personally would probably not use this, any more than I would be likely to end an auction early,(which I have never done in my 3+ years on ebaY) if used thoughtfully and not abused - this is a really amazing tool.
-Rosalinda
(edited 'cause Druther MUST be lurking in the wings)
TAGnotes - daily email synopsis about the Online Auction Industry
http://www.topica.com/lists/tagnotes
posted on March 11, 2001 11:34:40 PM new
I think the vrane program works this way.
Lets say
Auction start is $9.99
VR is set at $50.00
One hour before closing Vrane will enter $50 in the "your maximum bid" and select "review bid".
If your virtual reserve was not met eBay will send the Confirm and review page. The vrane software can detect it and bomb the auction right there and then to end it. No bid is placed.
If the virtual reserve is met, the attempted bid will be too low and ebay will send the Problem with bid amount page instead. vrane will let the auction continue its normal end.
posted on March 12, 2001 04:39:36 AM new
The only problem with that is that the usual run-up in the last minutes or seconds is where most of the action is.
By using this "virtual reserve", a seller DOES eliminate the reserve fee, but they also risk losing a LOT of profits because it eliminates sniping too. I was watching a book that started at $5.99 and moved all the way to about $15 until the last 30 seconds of the auction ... it closed at over $150 and none of the bidders had been active until then. None of us wanted to show any interest in the book.
posted on March 12, 2001 08:03:36 AM new
If this feature becomes popular then eBay will most certainly do whatever it can to prevent it. For the following reasons:
It makes fee avoidance a simple matter. The whole point of charging for reserve auctions was to cut down on the abuse of the feature. This option will allow the "reserve" feature to be abused yet again.
It will really piss off bidders who have been bidding in good faith and suddenly discover that they were bidding against a virtual reserve.
How eBay will control the use of this feature is anyone's guess. My guess is that eBay will start keeping track of bid and auction cancellations and display that information on the feedback profile, just as it displays bid retraction information.
And leave it up to disappointed bidders to report sellers for excessive bid & auction cancelations.
posted on March 12, 2001 06:54:47 PM new
I just used it and it worked great! Set your minimum bid - choose between if you want to check the bid 30 minutes or 2 minutes before the auction - type in your explanation - and press submit.
posted on March 13, 2001 03:26:43 AM new
Seller puts up item for auction, no reserve but if the item doesn't reach a certain level the Virtual Reserve cancels the auction.
If a seller thinks that is 'fair' maybe they'd want to see Vrane offer similar programs to buyers.
Maybe Vrane can offer a program to buyers that automatically cancels bids. Buyer puts in proxy bids on several identical items then Vrane compares the bids and cancels all but the lowest bid before the first of those auctions end.
Maybe eBay should give sellers a canceled auction number in their feedback record like buyers get a canceled bid numbers in their feedback record. Once it is determine the seller is doing this as part of a fee avoidance practice in place of reserves or in the future to avoid BIN fees automatic actions take place.
I hope I can avoid sellers that would employ Vrane's virtual reserve, it seems very sleazy to me.
posted on March 13, 2001 04:00:07 AM new
I know a better way to prevent snipes. Someone should make a tool to extend an auction by lets say up to 10 minutes.
This would be an incredible tool especially against snipers. Imagine being able to extend your auction by a few minutes to ensure you get ALL of the bids in - including all the sniper bids.
I think this would be a much more productive way of handling snipers, increasing sales, and flat out doing good business !
posted on March 13, 2001 04:38:50 AM new
Auction extension = BAD IDEA.
Snipes are GREAT – unless they are the ONLY bid and unless you are the losing bidder.
Anyway, this thread was about “understanding” Vrane’s tool.
Some will like it and use it – some won’t.
It seems to me that eBay has done everything they can to defeat the concept of auction that made them successful in the first place with WATCH and BIN.
All too often an “auction” now becomes a 10-7-5 or 3 day “preview”. Title Search is usually lagging w-a-y behind, description search appears to be chronically crippled and bidders are more than willing to chip away in one-bid increments and only bid within the closing minutes. I think that if eBay would concentrate on bidders being able to find items among the listings bloat, sellers would be better off.
In the interim, I welcome any legal tool that allows the seller to achieve the maximum return on their auction.
posted on March 13, 2001 08:46:30 AM new
This new tool from Vrane seems is not something that I would use. I would rather let the auction end for less than I expect than cancel bids.
cix,
I know in Yahoo, you can have the auction extended. Personally, I would not have a use for it unless I got a lot of bids in the last few minutes of the auction continuously.
-Trey
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"If your mind can concieve it, and you believe it, then you probably can achieve it."
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