What's Up With These Ebay Starting Bids?

Thanks for your thoughts mycrob. I won't give up.

High buy-it-nows scare me away from even trying a best offer option. I have not had good success with best offers. I've offered very solid best offers and they are almost always turned down.

I am also seeing a lot of high starting bids. No one bids on them and the seller just relists the item hoping for some fool to go for it. There is one item though which takes the cake. The seller has listed price of $45000 for a coin which is worth around 80 cents (I bought one recently). Don't now what these people are thinking!

Their's a lot of cup and coin, hide and seek on ebay from what I have seen.

They will list buy it nows high then have auctions every day for the same item over and over again always selling at sometimes 1/3rd the price. Seems to be in this case the auction is the advertising and the buy it nows is the impulse buys that people dont search around for better deals.

They will do an auction with a starting bid thats only 1 or 2 dollars lower then a buy it now already listed and I've watched it go up as much as 10 or 20% higher then the buy it now. (On these if I really wanna save the dollar or two I bid the at the buy it now price and if it goes over buy the buy it now instead.)

I dont know that last coin but I bet some of these insane listings are so when people sort by most expensive they are right on top or they really are hoping some super rich idiot doesn't know whats going on but even I dont think thats a real possiblity lol. (Maybe 1000$ on a 100$ item or something but thousands and millions I dont think so.)

I think some really are people who dont know what they are doing. I see 1976 2 dollar bills in very circulated condition listed for 3 and 4 dollars a piece grouped all the time when you can get brand new uncirculated sequential 2003s in batches of 5 to 100 or more for 2.40 on the bill or less. 90% of the time even decent looking circulated 1976s only go for 2.40 or less. When I am in the mood to 'stock up' on 1976 2$s I bid 2.40 on everything that remotely looks like a whole bill and get most of them for less even face value where the seller lost money because they had to pay for the stamp and ebay charges. :|

These high starts took off after ebay started free listings. Sellers have high starts hoping to dupe 1 out of the 3,437,344 people that are looking on ebay. It only takes one to make their day. Sad.

and same here

I refuse to make an offer or even look at BIN because of those sellers. I'm sure there are a FEW respectable sellers who would consider an reasonable offer but because of these sellers they won't even get a look from me.