When you place a bid on ebay, you bid the maximum that you're prepared to
pay. For example if the starting price the seller wants is 4.99, and you're
prepared to pay 10.99, then that's what you bid. If you're the first bidder,
it will show you as the highest bidder at 4.99. Ebay keeps the rest of your
bid hidden, and it's only put on the items if someone else bids, but only in
the increments that are ebay policy. I think it's 20p in the UK up to 5
pounds, and 50p from then on.
Bidder 2 is prepared to pay 5.99 and puts on a bid for that amount, but
you'll be shown as the highest bidder at 6.49.
Bidder 2 goes to 7.99, and you're still shown as highester bidder at 8.59
Bidder 2 has another go at 11.09 and they become the highest bidder at
11.09, and they will have outbid your highest of 10.99 by 10p
The fact that that it wasn't 50p higher than your highest bid doesn't matter
because it was more than 50p higher than the highest bid showing when they
put their bid on. When the auction ended the amounts bid are revealed, and
you would kick yourself for losing out by 11p. I lost an item yesterday by
2p - the previous bidder had a highest bid of 12.00 which I didn't know
because the highest bid was showing as 9.99, so I bid 11.99. The fact that
she bid 12.00 before me meant that I still wouldn't win if I'd bid 12.00
(earlier bids take precedence), I'd have had to bid 12.01. I'm kicking
myself very hard.
If bidder 2 gave up at 7.99, and no-one else bid, you'd get the item for
8.59. Ebay only uses the excess of your bid if you've been outbid. When the
auction has ended, the bid amounts are revealed. The bid history would shown
your highest bid as 8.59, not 10.99 because 8.59 was all that was used of
what you were prepared to pay.
It doesn't matter whether you put your highest bid on early or within the
last few seconds of the auction.
If you put it on too soon, you could end up paying more than you needed to
because others will try to outbid you, but if you put it on too late, others
might have been waiting to put their higher than your maximum on at the last
minute and you won't win the item anyway.
The main reason for leaving it until late is that some people get auction
fever and get carried away. You quite often see two bidders frantically
competing with each other if you look at the bid history (although you don't
know the actual amounts their bidding you can have a good guess when they do
that because the current high bid generally only goes up in 50ps or 1
pounds), and they can end up paying a lot more than the item's worth.
Obviously it's in the seller's interest to have this happen because they get
a very high price for their goods.
You get to know the people who bid on the same type of items that you're
interested in, and can make an educated guess at what they're prepared to
pay if you look at previous items that you've both bid on.
The game is that the seller wants the highest price he/she can get, and the
bidder wants to get the item at the lowest price he/she can.
Jean in Poole
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