EBay for Dummies (26 page)
Authors: Marsha Collier
Tags: #Electronic Commerce, #Computers, #General, #E-Commerce, #Internet auctions, #Auctions - Computer network resources, #Internet, #Business & Economics, #EBay (Firm)
If you’ve made an error, you must retract your bid prior to the last 12 hours of the auction. At this point, a retraction removes all bids you have placed in the auction. Mistakes or not, when you retract a bid that was placed within the last 12 hours of the listing, only the most recent bid you made is retracted — your bids placed prior to the last 12 hours are still active.
Here’s how to retract a bid while the auction’s still going on:
1. Go to
http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?RetractBidShow
.
2. Read the legalese and scroll down the page. Enter the item number of the auction you’re retracting your bid from. Then open the drop-down menu and select one of the three legitimate reasons for retracting your bid.
3. Click the Retract Bid button.
You receive a confirmation of your bid retraction via e-mail. Keep a copy of it until the auction is completed.
If you’ve made a mistake when making a Best Offer, go to the following:
http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll
The seller may send you an e-mail to ask for a more lengthy explanation of your retraction, especially if the item was a hot seller that received a lot of bids. You may also get e-mails from other bidders. Keep your replies courteous. After you retract one bid on an item, all your lower bids on that item are also retracted (unless the retraction is done within the last 12 hours), and your retraction goes into the bidding history — another good reason to have a really good reason for the retraction. The number of bids you’ve retracted also goes on your feedback rating scorecard.
After the auction: Side deals or personal offers?
If a bidder is outbid on an item that he or she really wants or if the auction’s reserve price isn’t met, the bidder may send an e-mail to the seller and see whether the seller is willing to make another deal. Maybe the seller has another similar item or is willing to sell the item directly rather than run a whole new auction. You need to know that this could happen — but eBay doesn’t sanction this outside activity.
If the seller has more than one of the item, or the original auction winner doesn’t go through with the deal, the seller can make a Second Chance offer. This is a legal eBay-sanctioned second chance for
underbidders
(unsuccessful bidders) who participated in the auction. Second Chance offers can also be made in reserve auctions if the reserve price wasn’t met.
Any side deals other than Second Chance offers are unprotected. My friend Jack collects autographed final scripts from hit television sitcoms. So when the curtain fell on
Seinfeld,
he had to have a script. Not surprisingly, he found one on eBay with a final price tag that was way out of his league. But he knew that by placing a bid, someone else with a signed script to sell might see his name and try to make a deal. And he was right.
After the auction closed, he received an e-mail from a guy who worked on the final show and had a script signed by all the actors. He offered it to Jack for $1,000 less than the final auction price on eBay. Tempted as he was to take the offer, Jack understood that eBay’s rules and regulations wouldn’t help him out if the deal turned sour. He was also aware that he wouldn’t receive the benefit of feedback (which is the pillar of the eBay community) or any eBay Standard Purchase Protection insurance for the transaction.
If you even
think about
making a side deal, remember that not only does eBay
strictly
prohibit this activity, but eBay can also suspend you if you are reported for making a side deal. And if you’re the victim of a side-deal scam, eBay’s rules and regulations don’t offer you any protection. My advice? Watch out!
Avoiding deadbeat (non-paying bidder) status
Some bidders are more like kidders — they bid even though they have no intention of buying a thing. But those folks don’t last long on eBay because of all the negative feedback they get. In fact, when honest eBay members spot these ne’er-do-wells, they often post the deadbeats’ user IDs on eBay’s message boards. Some eBay members have created entire Web sites to warn others about dealing with the deadbeats . . . ahem . . .
non-paying bidders.
(Civilized but chilly, isn’t it?)
Exceptions to the deadbeat (er, sorry,
non-paying bidder
) rule may include the following human mishaps:
A death in the family
Computer failure
A huge misunderstanding
If you have a good reason to call off your purchase, make sure that the seller knows about it. The seller is the only one who can excuse you from the sale.
If you receive a non-paying bidder warning but you’ve paid for the item, eBay requires proof of payment. That would include a copy of the check (front and back) or money order, a copy of the payment confirmation from PayPal (or other online payment service), or an e-mail from the seller acknowledging receipt of payment. If the seller excused you from the auction, you need to forward the e-mail with all headers.
Fax hard copies to eBay at 888-379-6251.
Send the e-mail via an online form. Go to
pages.ebay.com/help/buy/appeal-unpaid-item.html
, click the link to the online form, and plead your case.
There’s no guarantee that your non-paying bidder appeal will be accepted. eBay will contact you after an investigation and let you know whether your appeal was successful.
eBay has a message for non-paying bidders: The policy is
three strikes and you’re out.
After the first complaint about a non-paying (deadbeat) bidder, eBay gives the bad guy or gal a warning. After the third offense, the non-paying bidder is suspended from eBay for good and becomes
NARU
(Not A Registered User). Nobody’s tarred and feathered, but you probably won’t see hide nor hair of that user again on eBay.
Chapter 7
Power-Buying Strategies
In This Chapter
Knowing your competition
Finding the hidden secrets in the bidding history
Placing a token bid
Using canny strategies to win your auction
When I travel the country talking about eBay, I speak to so many people who find an item on eBay, bid on it, and at the last minute — the last hour, or the last day — are outbid. Sad and dejected, they find losing often cuts to the core and makes them feel like losers.
You’re not a loser when you lose an auction on eBay. You just may not know the fine art of sneaky bidding (my way of saying
educated
bidding).
When the stakes are high and you really, really want the item, you have to resort to a higher form of strategy. Sports teams study their rivals, and political candidates scout out what the opposition is doing. Bidding in competition against other bidders is just as serious an enterprise. Follow the tips in this chapter and see if you can come up with a strong bidding strategy of your own. (Feel free to e-mail me with any scathingly brilliant plans; I’m always open to new theories.)
Make an Offer!
If you come across a fixed-price listing and you’re in the mood to negotiate, why not make an offer? A seller on eBay can use the Make Offer option anytime they list a fixed-price item. It should indicate to you that you’re dealing with a seller who’s motivated to sell. The eBay Make an Offer option is a great way to get bargains. You make an offer on the item and the seller will either accept your offer or send you a counteroffer.
Making an offer to buy an item has a drawback; the seller has 48 hours to respond to you and you may find the same item from another seller at a better price before then. By making an offer, you guarantee that you will buy the item at the price of your offer if the seller agrees to it. If they don’t you’re off the hook and can find another of the item elsewhere.
To make an offer, click the Make Offer button (instead of Buy It Now button); see Figure 7-1.
Figure 7-1:
Use the Make Offer option anytime you’re not in a rush and want to wangle a good deal.
When making an offer, you might want to put in a really, really low offer. But be sensible; if the item is new, the seller may have only a little wiggle room on the price. Also, putting in a low offer (say $10 on a $25 item) may just annoy the seller and he or she may turn you down without giving you an opportunity to negotiate.
Find Out an Item’s Bidding History
You can access the bidding history by clicking the History link, which appears after the number of bids on the item page. The bidding history lists everyone who is bidding on the item. You can see how often and at what time bids are placed, but you can’t see the bidder’s real eBay username because (to protect the innocent) eBay changes user IDs to a gibberish of asterisks and numbers. Each bidder is assigned a faux bidder ID in the history. Look at Figure 7-2 to see the bidding history on an auction where I’m no longer the highest bidder.
Figure 7-2:
The bidding history tells you the date and time of day at which the bidders placed their bids as well as the amount.
Pay attention to the times at which bidders are placing their bids; you may find that, like many eBay users, the people bidding in this auction seem to be creatures of habit — making their bids about once a day and at a particular time of day. They may be logging on before work, during lunch, or after work. Whatever their schedules, you have great info at your disposal in the event that a bidding war breaks out: Just bid after your competition traditionally logs out, and you increase your odds of winning the auction.
Early in an auction, there may not be much of a bidding history for an item, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still check out the dates and times a bidder places bids. You can also tell that a bidder practices
sniping
(discussed later in this chapter) if his or her bid zips in during the last few minutes (or even seconds!) of the auction. You may have a fight on your hands if the bidder does practice sniping.
Get to Know the Other Bidders
It used to be an easy task to study up on your competition, but the brains at eBay got smart and made it all but impossible. That is, all but impossible to me! In this section I show you how I figured out the now-circuitous route you can use to research your competition.
The concatenated ID of the person the item would belong to if the auction ended right now is listed on the auction item page. You can tell if the auction has bidders because the number of bidders appears on the listing page.
Take a look at this ID because you may see this bidder again later in this auction. By clicking the ID, you are presented with a page like the one shown in Figure 7-3, which shows just what that bidder has been up to — bidding wise.
Figure 7-3:
Clicking on an ID in the bid history reveals a lot about the competition. In this sample, this person is clearly
highly interested
in the Jewelry category. Are they a dealer?
Now, how do you find out more? After you’ve lost an auction or two, go to eBay’s Advanced Search, use the Items By Bidder search option, and run a search as described next
To get the skinny on a competitor, here’s the move:
1. Type your user ID.
2. Click the option button on the Include Completed Listings line.
Keep in mind that eBay has a 30-day limit on the auction information it returns, so don’t expect to see results from a year ago.
3. Choose the number of items you want to see per page.
4. Click Search.
On the resulting page you will see a list of all the items you’ve bid on. The ones that you’ve won are marked with your user ID and an asterisk (*) indicating you are the winner. You will also see the listings that you’ve lost, and the user ID of the person that won!
The tale of the 3-plus-negative seller
A friend of mine took a risk and bid on an old Winchester rifle (now a banned item — see Chapter 9 for a rundown of what you’re allowed and not allowed to sell on eBay) without reading the seller’s feedback. The seller had a (+3) next to his user ID, which is a somewhat okay rating. Good thing my friend lost the auction. It turned out that the seller had a whopping 20 negative feedback messages. He had 23 positives, mostly posted by suspicious-looking names. Repeat after me:
Always read the feedback comments!
Now, run the same search with that person’s user ID and you’ll get an idea of how much they bid in similar auctions to win. I think you should check all of the bidder’s auctions to see how aggressively he or she bids on items. You can also get a pretty good handle on how badly a bidder wants specific items — and how high that person will bid before dropping out.
If the bidder was bidding on the same item in the past that you’re both interested in now, you can also get a fairly good idea of how high that person is willing to go for the item.
You may be tempted to try to contact a bidder you’re competing with so you can get information about the person more easily. This is not only bad form but could also get you suspended. Don’t do it.