Thread: Bid Retractions

I am considering bidding on a razor on Ebay, but I just noticed that the current leading bidder has had 33 bid retractions in the last 6 months. This seems very suspicious to me. At a minimum, I think there might be the potential for funny business towards the end of the bidding. And then I wonder if he/she is a shill bidder.

Should I be concerned?

Harry

Originally Posted by HarryA

Should I be concerned?

Yes. That mant bid retractions is a major red flag.

33 bid retractions in 6 months, ya that sounds very suspicious. But it really comes down to how much are you willing to pay for the razor, once you decide, set your max bid and wait and see. If you win great, if not, there will always be another razor that'll catch your eye. I recently won an auction, but someone ran up the price for me in the last hour. I still won, but I do wonder if this was a case of a shill bidder just to run up the price. But on the other hand, I won it for less than my max bid so I was still happy, although I would have been much happier if I paid less. Bid only what you're willing to pay and don't get roped into a bidding war and you'll be much happier.

+1 on setting your max. I also wait until the last minute to place it if I can to avoid someone else's overzealous bidding.

The very odd thing about it, to me, is that there are supposed to be parameters around retracting bids. The bay has, AFAIK, made it more difficult to retract your bid than it used to be. I suppose if a person ignores the rules, and ebay doesn't police that, there will be no consequences because of it.

I agree with the above post - set your own max price, and don't worry about what others are doing bidding.

Proxy bidding has been going on since the beginning of time, and it will go on regardless of ebay rules, but it shouldn't change what you're willing to pay for something.

If your goal is to pay a lot less than what you have as a max and you're concerned that the proxy bidder is making you pay more than you want, then enter a lower max, and use esnipe. Then you don't have to pay attention to what's going on in the interim, you just see at the end whether you win or lose, and you don't actually have a bid in ebay until the last second, so if you see bids before yours were funny, you can just cancel the esnipe bid.

If you'd like retribution, you can easily go report the person who has 33 retracted bids to ebay. That's an awful high amount. I think I've retracted one bid in about 350 over a 12 year period because I misread something, and none since esnipe.

If you see something like that I would report it to ebay (there is a link right on the auction page that says "report item"). Who knows if they actually do anything, but it makes me feel a little better when I flag something fishy.

As an eBay seller, I've noticed that some people just bid to either see what the reserve is set at or to see what the current bidder's max bid is. As soon as they find out, they retract their bid. It's very annoying, but it seems to be happening more often.

Ignore everyone else, it is an uncontrollable variable, place your max bid, put the item in the watch list and every now an then it will come up for sale again because the deal went south. In your watch list it will be described as re listed.

I've lost auctions before and have been sent second chance offers months later because the original buyer never paid. Never hurts to throw in a bid of what you want to pay for the item and see what happens. Can't win 'em all. (actually, you can but that's not how the saying goes)