posted on August 29, 2000 01:21:58 PM new
Anyone who has been using Bid Wins on Y and has taken it back to eBay?
I would appreciate your sharing experiences. Watching auctions and closing after the first bid, asking for emails after a bid etc. are options for making this work.
I wonder what problems and confusion it may have caused. How to handle second bidders has also been discussed but not many actual examples of the interaction of completed transactions has been shared.
Seems to provide no conflicts with eBay rules. Has merit for certain items and may build a following. Interesting concept for usage when people start buying for the holidays and want to close a transaction and move on when dealing with their shopping list even if they have to pay some premium in the price.
posted on August 29, 2000 06:31:29 PM new
Once I posted an auction on Ebay & noted in the description that I would close the auction as soon as it had a bid. It never got one though. That was right before I moved all my auctions to Yahoo.
Now I only post my truly one of a kind art objects on Ebay- they have done well for me there & have mostly bombed on Yahoo. On my last round of auctions I copied & pasted some of my failed Yahoo "first bid wins" auctions onto my Ebay descriptions & forgot to change the "first bid wins" blurb in the description. I didn't notice I had done that until after the auction was over! But I was monitoring the auction closely the whole time, and NOBODY bid until the very last second. The item ended up going for well over my opening bid. The customer happily paid and I figure the underbidders could have bid earlier & contacted me if they had expected me to honor the "one bid wins" that I mistakenly put in my ad. Maybe I was wrong to handle it that way, but I won't make that mistake again just the same.
Anyway, since my strategy is to use Ebay for my limited number of "auctionable" items and Yahoo for all the items that I know to the penny what I want my closing bid to be, selling "1st bid wins" on Ebay doesn't hold much appeal to me.
I do know that other sellers have posted success with a similar strategy on Ebay in the past. I remember there was one seller who said that he would guarantee in his description that he would end his auction early, that snipers weren't going to get the item! That strategy pretty well averts the problem of overbidders since he never named a specific cutoff price- he just guaranteed to end the auction as soon as he was satisfied with the bidding. I can think of one large disadvantage to his idea though- many shoppers only search for items that are ending that day!
