General > General Technical Chat
Is Ebay rigging bids?
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jmelson:
eBay uses "dutch bidding".  This is where the highest bidder wins the auction, but the winning PRICE is that of the 2nd highest bidder.  If two bidders offer the same bid, the earlier of those wins.
So, A bids $55, then later B bids $75.  B wins, but he pays $55 (or $55 plus the next price increment at that price level, which can be just a couple Dollars.)

Jon
Stray Electron:

--- Quote from: Deni on February 14, 2020, 10:25:59 pm ---
Yes, you are right -  AM/PM thing messed it up, but that's correct sequence... It would be too obvious - but now when I think of it - since e-bay charges a
percentage of sale, it's in their interest to get the highest price possible. When you enter auto-bid value, it's pretty easy to manipulate bidding process,
since you can't see actual account names (and links can point to basically anything). Say, you enter $500 as your maximum bid, algorithm can decide to
create a few fake bids and pump out more money from you than you should actually pay as long as the final amount is less or equal to $500.
You do it randomly, with various end-price differences and at various times, so there won't be visible pattern. Randomize the whole process good enough
and buyers would not  be able to spot it, sellers does not care since they will get more money for their stuff and everybody is happy... Best of all - you can't be caught !
Of course, if buyer is not using auto-bid then the whole scheme falls apart, but I guess there's a lot users using auto-bid, as you normally cant' spend the whole
day looking at e-bay.
Or I am just paranoid?

--- End quote ---

  yes, I think you're being paranoid.  Ebay could technically run up the bid to get a higher profit but the problem would be that since there was no real buyer, then the item would never be paid for and in that case, the seller would refuse to pay E-bay.  So end the end, E-bay would make nothing instead of a small amount.

   It would only take a few instances of non-existant buyers before the sellers caught on and once the word got around, everyone would stop doing business on E-bay.
TerraHertz:

--- Quote from: Stray Electron on February 15, 2020, 12:03:03 am ---  yes, I think you're being paranoid.  Ebay could technically run up the bid to get a higher profit but the problem would be that since there was no real buyer, then the item would never be paid for and in that case, the seller would refuse to pay E-bay.  So end the end, E-bay would make nothing instead of a small amount.

   It would only take a few instances of non-existant buyers before the sellers caught on and once the word got around, everyone would stop doing business on E-bay.

--- End quote ---

I agree. But still never bid on ebay other than via a snipe service. There are multiple advantages - avoiding bidding wars and the stress that causes, not signalling your interest, eliminating all this waste of time wondering about bid sequences and cheating (for eg, seller bidding you up), saving my time by not having to pay attention to the item during the bidding period, etc.

Deni:

--- Quote ---And it raises the question: why is a Croatian using eBay in 12-hour time, in the US Pacific timezone?

--- End quote ---

Well, that's beyond me. If there's an option to change that, I can't find it - do you know how to change time display format as a buyer?
Deni:

--- Quote ---
  yes, I think you're being paranoid.  Ebay could technically run up the bid to get a higher profit but the problem would be that since there was no real buyer, then the item would never be paid for and in that case, the seller would refuse to pay E-bay.  So end the end, E-bay would make nothing instead of a small amount.


--- End quote ---

OK, imagine this scenario - item initial price is $25, I enter auto-bid amount of $100. Now I am the highest bidder with $25. Then some "robot" with fake account kicks in and places auto-bid to $90.
Who will win that auction and what will be the end-price? Me, with end price of $91. And how can you tell that it was not a real bidder? You can't and since I will pay for the item seller won't know either.
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