Thread: Second chance offer??

It's hard to tell. This did look odd. The "winning" bidder still doesn't show a bid retraction for this month (maybe that takes a while) and the seller said there are no duplicates. I was the only one sniping. The first bidder put in an automatic eBay bid shortly after the item was listed. No telling what the max bid was. Second bidder came along on the last day and put in a flat bid. The first bidder's automatic bid went one increment over that. Then I sniped at the end and the first bidder's automatic bid ran it up one increment over my max bid. If you were to use a "shill" bidder that's exactly how it would go. The shill would run each bidder's automatic bids up to their max.

Most everybody uses eBay's automatic/proxy bidding. That way if you win an auction you only pay 1 increment over the next highest bidder's max. Your max might have been a lot higher than that. The idea of a shill bidder is to squeeze the difference out of the winner. The difference between what would have been a winning bid and their max bid. In my case that amounted to $9. If the "winning" bidder hadn't been there I would have won the auction for $78. Instead, I went (automatically) to my max bid of $87 and lost. The 2nd chance offer is for your last bid ($87 in my case).

The 2nd chance offer is automated. The seller just clicks on it and specifies how many and to which bidders they are made. The system automatically makes the offer with those bidders max bid in that auction.

The 2nd chance offer mechanism is obviously flawed in that it should never be allowed to be used the way it's set up for single items. There was a single auction for a single item. If the top bidder backs out then the winning bid would have obviously been the second bidder's bid. That winning bid would have been 1 increment over the third place bidder's max if they were using automatic bidding. The 2nd chance offer would work if straight bids were used and you rolled them back to eliminate the top bidder who backed out. eBay absolutely has the software in place to do this.

The argument is a bit different for mulitple items but still extremely weak. The assumption is that a bidder has multiple duplicate items and auctions them sierially, one after another. You might try to argue that since someone bid some amount for the item (and then backed out for a legitimate reason?) that subsequent auctions for duplicate items would go for the same amount. I'm not so sure that's valid.

It's something that's obviously skewed towards the seller and is just begging for abuse or even promoting it. Buyer's are on eBay looking for great deals or at least not paying more than they have to. Seller's are looking to get the max price. Ebay makes it's money from a cut of the sales price...

I'm sure they're aware of this and I assume the justification for leaving it is that the 2nd chance offer person isn't getting hurt. They did bid that amount and assumably feel the item was worth that to them. They also are not obligated in any way to take the 2nd chance offer and can implicitly reject it by simply not responding.

haha, here's eBay's wording on the top of the offer: "Lucky you. Here's a second chance to buy the item you recently lost."
That could translate to: "since you've exposed your max bid and it was the highest one the seller is willing to do a buy-it-now for that price".