Will “bid groups” revive the auction format?

May 14, 2007

This post was written in May 2007; specific information contained within it may be out of date.

If you already use third party sniping software, you’ll probably be familiar with the concept of “bid groups”. You can select a number of listings for the same type of item, set your maximum bid, and the software will try to win the first in the group. If it doesn’t, it will move on to the second, and the third, until you’ve either won an item, or discovered that your maximum bid really is too low.

Though eBay are generally dismissive of third-party sniping tools, it seems that they’re happy to adopt the idea of bid groups with Bid Assistant. This allows you to select up to ten listings and set maximum bids for each. The software will then bid for you on one auction at a time, stopping when you’ve won.

Bid Assistant isn’t a replacement for sniping software: from the Bid Assistant help pages, “You cannot schedule bids to be placed at a specific time”, and it appears that the first bid is placed immediately. “If you get outbid on an item, eBay will wait until that item closes before bidding on the next item in your group.” This should allow for other bidders who cancel their bids and leave you the high bidder again, or allow you to increase your high bid manually.

Though it’s not quite as sharp as some third-party tools, what Bid Assistant should cure are those buyers who bid on a dozen items when they only want one, and then either retract the bids or refuse to pay. That eBay have created the tool in the first place is a step forward: though they offer many listing and auction management features for sellers, comparable features for bidders have been non-existant until now.

eBay’s push towards reviving core listings has been all about sticks for sellers, so it’s nice to see a carrot being offered, and to buyers too. Personally I doubt that *anything* can revive the auction market for the low-cost repeatable items that I sell personally, but I can imagine that buyers of more expensive collectibles would like this. If active bidding replaces putting things on a watch list and forgetting about them, that has to be a good move. But sadly, like all the good stuff, this appears to be for the .com site only: I can’t find anything comparable on .co.uk.

Via Auctionbytes.

Written by Sue Bailey · Filed Under Uncategorized | 4 Comments 

Auctions that go on forever? No thanks!

January 30, 2007

This post was written in January 2007; specific information contained within it may be out of date.

WebProNews has an interesting piece proposing a solution to the problem of scamming bidders on high ticket auctions:

Now here’s another reason for eBay to start thinking seriously about automatically extending auctions when late bids hit. Scammers hitting electronics auctions with inflated bids followed by requests to ship items out of the country, spoofed PayPal payment notifications, and other naughtiness ought to be enough for eBay to do something about the situation. … If eBay enabled the ability to automatically extend an auction by a few minutes when a late bid hit at the last second, buyers and sellers could both benefit. Sellers could ban obvious fake bids, while buyers in legitimate sales would have the chance to increase their bids above the sniped amount, making more money for the seller.

I’ve been around eBay for a few years now, and this auto-extension option has been suggested a lot. But I’ve never seen it proposed as a solution to the problem of the Nigerian father who wants your mobile for his son’s birthday - so kudos to Mr Utter for imagination here. But I’m afraid he’s completely wrong.

There is already a solution to the problem of scamming bidders: buyer management. *Every* eBay seller should be using some of these: whether it’s just blocking buyers from countries to which you don’t ship, or whether you want to go the whole hog and block buyers without a credit card on file and/or without a Paypal account. Most legitimate buyers would pass this test; most scammers won’t.

Auction extensions are a bad idea for a whole host of reasons. eBay buyers ALREADY expect sellers to be at their computers 24/7 (*waves to the lady who mailed me at 4am and again at 7am to complain she hadn’t had a response*): extending auctions would just make things worse. It would also vastly increase the problems of bidding wars: most of us have had experience, either as buyer or seller, of two or more bidders who between them drive the auction price way above what any sane person would expect. Currently, eBay’s hard ending does put a curb on that; with extensions in place, nothing would. We would just exchange one set of non-paying bidders for another.

[PS - Hey, WebProNews, how about some form of comments/trackback on your articles? No dialogue is just *so* Web 1.0 :-p ]

Written by Sue Bailey · Filed Under Uncategorized | Comments Off 

‘Faster Refresh’ and ‘Watch this item’ roll out starts

November 23, 2006

This post was written in November 2006; specific information contained within it may be out of date.

eBay have started to roll out the Faster Refresh along with the Watch this item link being changed into a button. Currently the button is only appearing on the .com site but it’s expected to migrate fairly rapidly across all eBay sites.

Written by Chris Dawson · Filed Under Uncategorized | Comments Off 

Easier sniping comes to eBay with “Faster Refresh”

November 20, 2006

This post was written in November 2006; specific information contained within it may be out of date.

Coming next week to auctions on eBay will be the ability to refresh just the top part of the auction page so that you can watch the bids in those vital last few minutes of an auction when it counts most. This will save the whole page reloading and be a great new utility for all you manual snipers out there! Somehow using sniping software (and incidentally giving your eBay user name and password to a third party!) just isn’t the same.

At the same time the watch this item link will be added as a button in the centre of the page for greater visibility.


A great couple of new features, along with more promotion of mobile eBaying which is rolling out across Europe

Written by Chris Dawson · Filed Under Uncategorized | 3 Comments