another ebay question

[MikeKing]

do sellers on ebay have duplicate accounts and bid up the prices of items they are selling, or does ebay prevent that from happening?

[thebeav]

Hi Mike,

I've seen this happen. Of course, eBay doesn't appreciate it and you will be suspended for 30 days. It's tough for them to catch you though and I think that they depend on bidders help in turning in suspects.....

Paul

[jhollan2]

It definitely happens! Check the bid history on an item and see if the person bidding has a very low feedback, as well as the same hometown or state as the seller (they're not always so smart). Also, check and see if the bidder is bidding on all of the sellers items. You may also want to look at the stuff they bought in the past...if all the feedback is from your seller than chances are hes a shill...

 

I've seen this used a lot and its not always terrible. Sometimes its just a way to avoid ebay reserve costs and you can still get the item for a reasonable price.

 

-Jill

[spiny]

Another good tell is when the seller relists something that supposedly already sold to the shill and the shill is bidding on it again.

[gmarguli]

Sure it happens all the time. According to eBay they have some super secret software that is designed to catch shills. In reality, they don't care. As long as the seller pays the fees shill away. They'll catch an extremely obvious shill or if you do something stupid, they'll catch you, but for the average shills, probably 99.9999% of them get away with it. More if you are a Power Seller.

 

You can turn in a shill, but they rarely do anything about it. I turned in one that pissed me off. I basically had 100% proof that it was a shill. They did nothing. They couldn't find enough proof. A few months later the original seller started using his shill to sell items under the same company name.

 

Bid your max and bid it at the VERY end of the auction and you don't have to worry about shills.

 

And the old ways of catching shills doesn't really work for the smart shills. I'm in CA, but I can register an eBay ID as if I were in NY. I can then list an item for sale and put it in the "local" section for Miami, FL. When it sells I can have a friend ship it from AZ. How are you going to put me together with another ID listed as CA? There are private auctions, multiple email addresses, using overall legit accounts to shill a few times a month, etc. You could never catch a smart shill.

 

And personally, I think shills don't really affect the selling price of the item. The shill either bids it higher than market price in which case the seller is hit with fees or the shill replaces a legit bid at a lower level.

[michael]

the lowest of the low

pure greed

capitalism in its rawest form

 

this ebay

 

 

michael

[solid]

Greg, shillers do affect final prices paid every day!

 

How would you like to win a coin you wanted and the bidding history looks like this?:

 

gmarguli $300

shillbidder $295

lastlegitbidder $245

 

You just paid $50 more than you should have!

 

Ken

[gmarguli]

Greg, shillers do affect final prices paid every day!

 

How would you like to win a coin you wanted and the bidding history looks like this?:

 

gmarguli $300

shillbidder $295

lastlegitbidder $245

 

You just paid $50 more than you should have!

 

Ken

 

My belief is that the shill just replaces another legit bidder at the $295 level. A shill isn't going to bid higher than a legit level. If a shill bid $500 they would win the item and that isn't what they want. The point of the shill is to bump up the current bidding.

 

However, if we assume that the supply/demand equation is efficient, then all the bumping does is replace legit bids that would have been there at those lower levels. Just because the last legit bid was at $245 doesn’t mean that there weren’t many other bidders willing to pay more, but didn’t because the shill had already staked out that bid level (i.e. Bidder Jim is willing to pay $290 for the item, but doesn’t bid because the current price is at $300. Had the shill not been in there the current bid would have been $250 and Bidder Jim would have knocked it up to $295 with him still losing out).

 

A shill might work in more esoteric items where one person values it significantly higher than the marketplace, but for 99.99% of items on eBay, I don't think it matters.

[braddick]

Ken,

I understand your logic, but Greg would have paid what he was willing for the coin. Really, not $50. more as if he wasn't willing to pay $300.00 than he wouldn't have placed that top bid.

I get what you mean though. He might have paid a discounted price had it not been for a shill, but regardless, Greg bid what he was willing to buy the coin for.

[solid]

Certainly he paid what we was willing to pay, just not what he should have had to pay for this coin (though he'll never know the difference).

 

Suppose the high bid was sitting at $250 for several days before close, with the shill bidder being the high bidder. Greg really wants the coin because he has been trying to find this particular piece (or for whatever reason), and is willing to pay $325 in order to win it. He snipes the auction with a few seconds left and is happy to win it at $300 (effectively overpaying by $50).

 

I understand Greg's point about efficiencies of the bidding process, but I would bet that annually, millions of dollars are overpayed on ebay coins alone due to shills.

[Leothelion]

An interesting topic indeed! I was thinking about this last week and almost started a thread about such but more in the lines of the bid amounts.

What kind of bidding is happening here?

Notice how half the bids (particularly the first 8 and last bid) that end with a 0 or 5 or are slightly higher than the dollar amounts that end in a 0 or a 5. For example the $126.32 is slightly higher than $125.00, a dollar amount that ends in a 0 or a 5.

The next few bids are puzzleing to say the least. Why did that one bidder stop bidding $2.50 before the winning bid. I know that there is a way to figure out what to bid before not going over but I can't remember at the moment how it's done.

 

Leo

[gmarguli]

He didn't stop $2.50 under the higher bid. He likely bid his max and the winner had a much higher bid. The fishnforbrgns bidder bid his max and the system knocked it up $2.50, the current bid increment at that level, and the higher bidder won it.

 

Had the high bidder won it for under the next bid increment, then that would be interesting.

[Here]

I pulled a real winner about a year ago. I had a coin up for auction and it was already about $15 over the price I had hoped to get for it. It was 5 days out and there were 4 different bidders. So, instead of leaving well enough alone, I put in a bid thinking somebody would outbid me before the close. Wrong! I ended up winning so I sent the coin to a wholeseller and got $20 instead of the $45 before I stuck my nose in there. Hey, what do you expect from a newbe. I didn't even know it was against the rules, but I do admit I felt it wasn't right. So, I learned not to stick my nose into a auction that involves my own coin. And to think I could have been suspended from E-Bay for causing myself to loose money!! Jerry