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Kujacker-Ha! Wow I hadn’t thought of that. Could you imagine? A 5 day auction could be dragged out for 2 weeks or more.
I don’t really see that happening since in auctions where the end time is extended, it’s usually no more than 30-60 second extensions, even less if the bid is placed under 10 seconds. To keep an auction going more than a day it would require hundreds of bids, and many thousands to keep it going extra weeks. Ex: with a 60 second extension, there would need to be 1,440 bids to keep an auction going an extra day, assuming there is only one bid per minute.
No, I don’t see ebay doing this. I probably wouldn’t bid there if they did.
Regarding bid retractions (and such) again: If you DO ever suspect someone of shill or shield bidding, please contact me privately via ebay@windstoneeditions.com and I will investigate.
-Shill bidding is when a bidder with no intent to buy deliberately bids up pieces to hugely inflated prices. These people generally have very little or no feedback and may retract a lot of their bids to keep from accidentally winning. Shill bidding is generally done by the seller themselves under another account to make their stuff sell for more. However, as was the case with our auctions a few years ago, we had people we didn’t know bidding up our auctions on purpose. I still have no idea why they did that since it didn’t benefit anyone. I checked the bidding history of the last one who did that and they were also shilling designer purses.
-Shield bidding is when one person bids a low amount, and then they (under another account name) or a friend under a different account, bids a very large amount. The idea is to scare other bidders away from bidding (to shield against other bids). Then in the last few minutes or seconds of the auction, the person who entered the high amount retracts their bid, and the low bid wins. I’m not 100% sure how this works since no one else could have seen the high bid unless the auction is bid up to that high amount by other people (thus rendering the first person’s low bid moot), but apparently it does happen sometimes. Maybe it works better if multiple accounts are involved in placing fake high bids against each other, then they all retract their high bids in the last minute. Something like that would be pretty obvious though, since the auction would end with multiple large bid retractions showing. Shield bidders will have a lot of retracted bids in their history, and their bid retractions will be for high amounts very close to the auction end (like in the last few minutes). You will also notice that one person (or group of people) will consistently win or almost win the actions that the shield bidder(s) retracted bids from. Additionally, the person or persons doing the bid retractions generally won’t reenter any bids.
Thank you Pam, & very much understood. When it comes to Ebay now, I either do the ‘Buy Now’s or put in 1 max bid near the end, not even messing w/ the bid wars during. The end price by then is usually dang close to my max bid. I do at least agree with the fairness of bidders being protected w/ their names hidden, prevents messages afterward all sour-grapey. :spank:
Here’s to your continued success on Ebay, & all future product endeavors. (if there was an emoticon holding up a beer, I’d use it here)
-Mel.
Pam Thompson wrote:TanPhoenix:
For the record, we have had VERY few bid retractions. Lately they have been from one person, a genuine collector, and primarily the retractions are on max bids that were not yet reached anyway 🙂 So it appears that they are just rethinking how much they really want to pay for something in the end.Is that eBay “legal?” I don’t recall seeing that as one of the reasons for retracting. And for the record, that person has actually had 13 retractions in the last six months. Perhaps only some were for Windstones though?
As an interesting side note, for anyone who has kids, and reads a lot, there is a book series called Skippyjon Jones about a siamese cat who has three little sisters. One is a siamese cat named….Ju-Ju Bee Jones! Thought it was a cute coincidence. 😀
Keeper of the Fledgings
syn wrote:Is that eBay “legal?” I don’t recall seeing that as one of the reasons for retracting. And for the record, that person has actually had 13 retractions in the last six months. Perhaps only seven were for Windstones though?
People can stop talking like I’m not right here on the forums. I’m sure people have matched me to many items(it’s not hard. I know pretty much who I’m bidding against now, based on feedback counts). I have my reasons for those retractions. It’s not something I use lightly, and I’m not shilling or shielding.
syn wrote:Pam Thompson wrote:TanPhoenix:
For the record, we have had VERY few bid retractions. Lately they have been from one person, a genuine collector, and primarily the retractions are on max bids that were not yet reached anyway 🙂 So it appears that they are just rethinking how much they really want to pay for something in the end.Is that eBay “legal?” I don’t recall seeing that as one of the reasons for retracting. And for the record, that person has actually had 13 retractions in the last six months. Perhaps only some were for Windstones though?
Yes, only some were for Windstones, but this person has bought before, paid before, and their retractions were not indicative of bid shielding.
No, it is not technically ebay legal to retract a bid just because you had a change of heart… However, I am also guilty of bid retracting because I changed my mind (on at least one occasion). I don’t think anyone should be criminalized for doing so unless its undermining the ability of other people to win stuff (which it isn’t in this case).
I’ve never retracted a bid, but if I’d had any bids out on ebay when Koda got sick in January I would have had to retract them. I needed all my extra money to pay the vet bills. I can see where you have every intention of buying honestly and life gets in the way, so you have to retract.
And we need to be polite of our other forum members when criticizing ebay behavior. When I first joined the forum, I drove a lot of ebay auctions up because other people kept outbidding my max bid. I didn’t snipe auctions at that time so I put a very large amount (that I was willing to pay) down. You can imagine my outrage when my ebay account was blasted on this forum for shill bidding. I was upset that I had lost every auction I wanted to win, and then to read people complaining about how I was unfairly raising prices the prices on auctions they won made me very angry. If they didn’t want to pay that much for a piece, they shouldn’t have outbid me.
It was during the sabotaged auction phase a few years ago, and I think they thought I was not a real person, let alone a forum member. However, we never know exactly what’s going on in someone’s life and whether we’re being fair with our comments.
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My art: featherdust.comWampus Dragon wrote:syn wrote:Is that eBay “legal?” I don’t recall seeing that as one of the reasons for retracting. And for the record, that person has actually had 13 retractions in the last six months. Perhaps only seven were for Windstones though?
People can stop talking like I’m not right here on the forums. I’m sure people have matched me to many items(it’s not hard. I know pretty much who I’m bidding against now, based on feedback counts). I have my reasons for those retractions. It’s not something I use lightly, and I’m not shilling or shielding.
To be fair, I had no idea who anyone was talking about. XD I don’t have time to trace scrambled names, and I don’t muck with doing so (then again I don’t bid on stuff). I don’t think syn was singling you out; just asking Pam a question. 🙂 No worries.
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