Bugger.

[unixronin]

...that these days, it's an exercise in complete futility trying to buy anything on eBay that anyone else wants, except via Buy It Now, unless you have a multi-megabit connection or an account with one of the automated robot-bid-sniping services.

And to think that when automated bid-sniping first started, eBay banned it because it was unfair.  I guess they musta decided that fairness could go fuck itself, 'cos they made more money off the last-90-seconds bid-sniping wars.

Comments

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

Why? I mean, if you want it more than anybody else, you can enter a maximum bid higher than where other people dare to tread. If your maximum bid is lower than someone else's... well, then obviously you didn't want it as much.

Now now, I understand the frustration of not 'winning' on ebay, but let's not throw our capitalist dogma out the window for some idealized 'fairness' that lets you have some material object for less than what somebody else is willing to pay for it.

If you were selling, wouldn't you want the highest bidder to win?

-Ogre

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

The thing is, this shit of the bid price going up $100 in the last 90 seconds doesn't give you time to think about whether you're willing to raise your bid. It turns into as much a race of who has the fastest net connection and can slam their bid in too close under the wire for anyone else to respond to, as to who's actually willing to pay the highest price. You can't get any idea of what an item's likely to go for and decide whether you're willing to spend that much when there's no bids until the last two minutes of the auction.

If you make sure sellers get the highest price, there's a fairer solution: simply make bids extend the closing time so that no auction closes until there have been no new bids in five minutes.

Auction bidding should not be a goddamn twitch-reflex game.

[attutle.livejournal.com]

I don't get it.

You have every chance to do your thinking ahead of time, place your maximum bid, and walk away. Come back later and see if you were outbid or not.

You are complaining about the twitch-game aspects, but skipping your chance to avoid that. Huh?

Is it that you don't trust ebay and figure they will jack the price up to your max, even if nobody else is close?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Is it that you don't trust ebay and figure they will jack the price up to your max, even if nobody else is close?

No. It's that if I just got narrowly outbid on something I really wanted that doesn't come up very often, I'd like to have at least the CHANCE to reconsider whether it's uncommon enough and I want it badly enough that I'm willing to go, say, $20 higher and see if that's enough, without it having to be a twitch-reflex snap decision.

Is this a difficult concept to grasp? Nobody seems to be understanding it.

[attutle.livejournal.com]

Perhaps we see something that you don't.

It will always look like you were narrowly outbid. That doesn't mean someone else doesn't have a significantly higher maximum bid set. Why does it matter to you if the system shows you were narrowly outbid at the last minute or two days earlier?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Well, OK, that and I'm sorta pissed at the extent to which eBay's decided it's morals and sense of fairness are available for sale where there's money to be made. All kinds of things, including bidding robots, that used to be illegal back when eBay had a soul are now considered fair play. They don't even seem to care about auction spam any more.

At least they're still making some effort on the outright fraudulent auctions.