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davidb
11-Nov-2007, 15:11
Have a look. (http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=230188439414&ssPageName=STRK:MEWA:IT&ih=013)

And I can't even sell my Zone VI.

David A. Goldfarb
11-Nov-2007, 15:16
Good heavens.

Colin Robertson
11-Nov-2007, 15:18
Ahhh . . . front AND rear lens caps included. How could anyone resist?

Dan Fromm
11-Nov-2007, 15:47
So offer the Zone VI with a lens, preferably known to be good. Ready to shoot and all that.

Good luck, have fun,

Dan

Nate Battles
11-Nov-2007, 15:53
I think eBay in general is getting crazy. People are bidding more on a some things than you can get them for new! Good for eBay, good for sellers. Oh well.

Marko
11-Nov-2007, 16:22
Barnum really knew his stuff. ;)

Alan Davenport
11-Nov-2007, 18:23
Marko beat me to it.

janepaints
11-Nov-2007, 19:15
Last week I noticed bids for sheet film which were higher than the everyday 'call up and order some' prices at photo retailers--and some of the film being bid-on may have been out-of-date! It wasn't exotic stuff--just the usual Kodak, Ilford etc.

I imagined two possibilities:

1. Some folks are very-poorly informed about the gear--perhaps thinking such stuff can ONLY be found on the bay--and so they go gung-ho for it, thinking 'get it or else'.

or

2. Some sellers (employing aliases or via cohorts) falsely bid and thus jack-up the prices in hopes of influencing price trends or to avoid selling their stuff for less than they desire.

I wish I had something to auction to take advantage of this trend.

Incredibly rare NON-WORKING Kodak Ball Bearing Shutter (The highly desirable one) from the now extinct Kodak Autographic camera, of which only two were ever made. Black with 24-karat gold lettering. Four-count-em-four shutter speeds. Plus 'B' and 'T' specially engraved thus for Bachman-Turner Overdrive who featured this shutter in their 'Taking Care Of Business' music video. Gotten from the private estate of Ansel Weston. Sold as-is. Handling, Packaging and Misc. Fee of $29.95 additional to bidding price and postage.
BUY IT NOW PRICE only $199.99

Walter Calahan
11-Nov-2007, 19:16
eBayers are buying up new and demo models of the Nikkor 10.5mm fisheye for digital cameras for more than B&H sells the lens new.

Fun to watch bidding going up to and over $700 for a lens that sells for $599.

Jeffrey Sipress
11-Nov-2007, 19:18
I'll take two. Do you do PayPal?

walter23
11-Nov-2007, 19:24
Maybe it's european buyers taking advantage of potentially duty-free shipping, what with the rock bottom US dollar and all?

Brian Ellis
11-Nov-2007, 19:40
I don't understand the bidding process for this item. The winning bidder submitted 5 bids at intervals of about 30 seconds and in increments of $100, all in the last couple minutes of the auction, without any intervening bids. IOW, he went from $1600 to $2000 for no apparent reason. I understand how ebay's proxy bidding works but there shouldn't have been any reason for the proxy system to increase the bid from $1600 to $2000 without anyone else bidding, should there? Is there some strategy behind this method of bidding or does it perhaps indicate something suspicious going on or was the buyer maybe just getting nervous that he wouldn't win and so kept increasing his maximum bid?

domenico Foschi
11-Nov-2007, 20:05
I don't understand the bidding process for this item. The winning bidder submitted 5 bids at intervals of about 30 seconds and in increments of $100, all in the last couple minutes of the auction, without any intervening bids. IOW, he went from $1600 to $2000 for no apparent reason. I understand how ebay's proxy bidding works but there shouldn't have been any reason for the proxy system to increase the bid from $1600 to $2000 without anyone else bidding, should there? Is there some strategy behind this method of bidding or does it perhaps indicate something suspicious going on or was the buyer maybe just getting nervous that he wouldn't win and so kept increasing his maximum bid?

I sometime do that to discourage my fellow bidders, but 6 bids sounds a little too much.
Could it be that the seller was manipulating the auction?
Who knows...

domenico Foschi
11-Nov-2007, 20:10
If you notice the user names of the bidders, they looks similar, and they look to be fairly new to ebay, with numbers of 2-3-4.
I have seen quite a few of these user names on ebay lately in the Phographic gear department and I wonder if they are in fact all connected.
It sure start smelling like a scam to me.

Dave Parker
11-Nov-2007, 20:21
Actually,

It looks like an inexperienced bidder up against a couple of shills...

Dave

Patrik Roseen
11-Nov-2007, 20:48
I agree there are some really strange pricing lately on ebay. In this particular case there might have been a Reserve not met until USD 2000 and this person really wanted it...

Mike Castles
11-Nov-2007, 20:53
Patrik, you got it..just looked and there was a reserve on this item. Still, agree it 'looks' funny but in the end I think the person that won the bid was just searching for the reserve price and found it before the auction ended.

c.d.ewen
11-Nov-2007, 22:18
It looks funny, but makes perfect sense. The winner kept upping his bids, trying to beat an earlier bidder's identical bid - look at the dates. The winner then entered a bid high enough to satisfy the reserve price.

I've wondered about those X***X ids for a while. I guess they're legitimate, as many of them have valid feedback. They do seem to drive up prices, though.

Charley

Bob Jones
11-Nov-2007, 22:32
I've wondered about those X***X ids for a while. I guess they're legitimate, as many of them have valid feedback. They do seem to drive up prices, though.

Charley

Those id's are legit and are generated by eBay. This is a quote from eBay's bidding information:

"eBay limits how your bid history information is displayed by using anonymous names. When the highest bid, reserve or Buy It Now price on an item reaches or exceeds a certain level, other members cannot view your member-specific information—such as your User ID—on the Bid History page. Your complete User ID is shown to the seller of this item only. Bidders are assigned anonymous names, such as a***b. These anonymous names are used consistently across all auctions that exceed a certain level."

walter23
11-Nov-2007, 23:22
Those are just ebay generated IDs to hide the identity of other bidders. The idea is to try to subvert fraudulent "second chance" offers that people sometimes send out to people who did not win an item but came close.


If you notice the user names of the bidders, they looks similar, and they look to be fairly new to ebay, with numbers of 2-3-4.
I have seen quite a few of these user names on ebay lately in the Phographic gear department and I wonder if they are in fact all connected.
It sure start smelling like a scam to me.

walter23
11-Nov-2007, 23:26
I've wondered about those X***X ids for a while. I guess they're legitimate, as many of them have valid feedback. They do seem to drive up prices, though.

Ebay automatically generates them once bidding goes above $200 or something.

Marko
12-Nov-2007, 06:00
Well, this one (http://cgi.ebay.com/Zeiss-Protar-632mm-F18-Very-rare_W0QQitemZ220168509758QQihZ012QQcategoryZ30076QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem) qualifies as both silly (unless I'm totally ignorant about this particular lens, which is always a possibility) and weird bidding pattern.

According to the feedback figure, the winner was certainly no newbie and he kept increasing the price in neat increments of $111 several times in a row, only a few seconds apart. Sounds almost too quick to be done manually, so he may have been using bidding software, although it still beats me why all the incremental increases - wouldn't it be faster, not to mention simpler, to set a high enough limit to begin with?

Frank Petronio
12-Nov-2007, 06:21
The question is whether the buyer actually pays for it too. Sometimes they are just trying to see what the reserve is and don't care.

Brian Ellis
12-Nov-2007, 08:01
It looks funny, but makes perfect sense. The winner kept upping his bids, trying to beat an earlier bidder's identical bid - look at the dates. The winner then entered a bid high enough to satisfy the reserve price.

I've wondered about those X***X ids for a while. I guess they're legitimate, as many of them have valid feedback. They do seem to drive up prices, though.

Charley

Ebay posted a message somewhere about this system of identifying bidders a year or so ago. It's just a way of hiding bidders' identities. The IDs are generated by ebay, not by the bidders.

Thanks Patrik, that's probably it though if I were searching for a reserve price because I really wanted an item I don't think I'd wait until the last few seconds of the auction to do it. If the reserve price had been $2050 he would have lost the item because he wouldn't have had time to get a $2050 bid in.

Dan Fromm
12-Nov-2007, 08:40
Frank, Marko, at90210 seems to have nearly infinite funds. He/she/it has won many auctions for high-end items over the years. Real bidder, pays.

David A. Goldfarb
12-Nov-2007, 08:50
Frank, Marko, at90210 seems to have nearly infinite funds. He/she/it has won many auctions for high-end items over the years. Real bidder, pays.

And if he or she lives in that zip code, unlimited funds would be expected.

http://www.city-data.com/zips/90210.html

Marko
12-Nov-2007, 08:53
Frank, Marko, at90210 seems to have nearly infinite funds. He/she/it has won many auctions for high-end items over the years. Real bidder, pays.

Yeah, that should be obvious from his feedback. I was simply commenting on his/her bidding technique. And the price he/she paid for that particular lens, of course. In other words, there must be some logic in it somewhere, only I can't readily see it from my vantage point. ;)

Dan Fromm
12-Nov-2007, 09:51
Marko, I have no idea why at90210 nibbled. Can't see the point of it m'self, seems better just to set up a snipe and go to sleep. And then, que sera, sera.

c.d.ewen
12-Nov-2007, 10:38
Ebay posted a message somewhere about this system of identifying bidders a year or so ago. It's just a way of hiding bidders' identities. The IDs are generated by ebay, not by the bidders.

Thanks Patrik, that's probably it though if I were searching for a reserve price because I really wanted an item I don't think I'd wait until the last few seconds of the auction to do it. If the reserve price had been $2050 he would have lost the item because he wouldn't have had time to get a $2050 bid in.

Yes, I had forgotten about that eBay ID policy. A good thing, too.

The winner's last bid could have been higher than $2000. EBay would have stopped him out at the reserve price.

I'm with Dan, though, on bidding. I put in a snipe for my highest price, then don't watch.

Charley

Kuzano
12-Nov-2007, 12:20
www.auctionsniper.com and go to bed.

Put in your absolute highest amount. The process will not use more of your money than it gets bid up to by the participation of other bidders, so all your money may not get used. The proxy aspect of eBay assures that, even with automated sniping.

There is even a facility for bidding on multiples of the same item and having the Auto Snipe mechanism cancel ensuing bids after one is won. I have not tested that.

You can set the snipe time for 3 to 5 seconds before auction ends.

You get an eMail from the autosnipe if you are outbid during the auction, but if you followed the rule of setting the snipe up with your absolute highest bid amount, hopefully you won't renegotiate your bid again.

You can modify or cancel your bid on the snipe service WITHOUT looking like a renigging bidder on eBay, up to the last few minutes of the auction.

sniping is done chronologically and on the highest bid amount (naturally), so if someone else is also sniping, it gets sorted out on the time and highest bid.

The fee is 1% of the final value ONLY on successful snipes.

A lot of people have negative feelings about the automated snipe process. The fact is that IT IS NOT sneaky and underhanded. If you lose to a snipe, it's not because it was automated. It's because you were too cheap to win the bid and someone bid higher. That's all there is to that question.

I don't think I have actually watched the end of an auction for 2 or 3 years.

I teach eBay classes at a community college. And I do tell students about automated sniping.

But mostly I teach them how to make money on eBay.

jnantz
12-Nov-2007, 22:10
... and to think i know someone who sold an empty box for 20$ plus shipping ;)