Bidder Psychology On Ebay--Explain This:

I have often thought the same thing, but I'm glad that people do bid it up early on. Sometimes I think this behavior helps me win an auction at a price I want, and other times it runs the price up too high for me.

Shill bidding? I have seen this too many times when bidding on a couple of decent Trade dollars.

I have found that if I put in a bid 2 or 3 days before an auction ends for Around $5 less than what I am actually willing to pay works for me. Someone will come in around the last 10 minutes or so of the auction ending and systematically bid me out. I then wait until the last 5 seconds or so and place a bid for my "buy price" and still manage to win the item for a few bucks less than what I was willing to pay. This strategy works well for large coppers, around a 90% success rate, but not so good with silver coins. The silver I want seem to go for a premium over Numismedia listed FMV so I just get out bid no matter what nearly every time.

I thought that when a bidder has the winning bid 2 or more times in a row it means they put in a max bid. Someone else attempted to out bid them with a number less than their max, resulting in the 1st bidder still being the winning bid at a higher number.

I see nothing "wrong" here either--just curious why somebody would actively outbid all others and then let themselves be outbid in the end--inexperience perhaps? (The coin sold for almost 1/2 a dealer's store price--so I can't believe price was the issue.)

with OneBowl.

It is confusing because it is not in date order - so there were several attempts to outbid a previous bid that appear in the list to have come before the higher bid, but if you look at the dates, they did not.

I refer to these types of bidders as "nibblers", who will keep bidding until they are ahead. One of the big reasons to snipe in my opinion.

I agree with Ken Kat: I bid once, right at the close, which is commonly called "sniping". I see no point in "beating the price up" with incremental bids.
I use ebay to buy car parts. I have watched a 99-cent item for nearly a week - still no bids. So I put in a $75 bid, with an hour to go, and I'm off to the cinema. I come home, and there were eight bids in the closing 90 seconds. Some of these were incremental - a waste of time. The winner was a sniper. I would never have won, because I wasn't willing to beat his price. C'est la vie.

i have been outbid by someone called 1****1 several times. and another who often outbids me is o*****1. was happening so often I started wondering if it was an ebay scam to up the bids.