A note about apparent shill bidding
 

I have an auction up on ebay currently, it's posted elsewhere so I won't use this thread to plug it again. But Looking at the bids I can see where it would look like shill bidding. Within an hour of it being listed one bidder placed a bid for a dollar. About a half hour later he was out bid. Over the next 2 minutes he placed 9 individual bids, I guess trying to find the top. He did not do so. Then two hours later a new bidder placed a bid which, while not taking the lead, established what the top bid must be. Then my rapid bidder came in and placed a top bid.

I have no idea who this person is, or even what he hopes to accomplish this early in an auction that should bring in the neighborhood of $2000. Since I can actually check his history I see he is a big buyer of vintage, he actually has a personal email posted in his about me page, and I see no retractions (I assume you find those on the feedback page somewhere?)

I don't recall having ever done business with him before, and I certainly don't know him personally. So, sometimes even when something looks fishy, it's not foul play. I think I've shown on this board that I am quick to question things and the first guy to report nefarious goings-on to ebay, but sometimes things that look odd, are only odd, not fraudulent.

Agree, easy to read a lot into things.

I've been critical of people's bidding habits on PWCC stuff and 90% of their recent bids are on PWCC. Then I realized that I might be someone other people would look at and perhaps bat an eye at my bidding. Sure 90% of my EBay bids in last 6 mos. have been on PWCC. Then again I've never cancelled a bid once on an eBay auction.

Keep in mind - its been noted before on this board that some bidders will intentionally appear to be shilling in order to scare off interest from others.

Considerable debate as to whether that phenomena is real or more "urban legend".

Unless you are doing that yourself I have no idea how you would know this actually exists.

I have tried it a few times with no luck. Items still sold at market value so I didn't scare anyone off. I also don't have bid retractions or a high bid percentage with any seller.

It's not an "urban legend". It's ridiculously widespread if anything. Bidders have been using this as a tactic almost from the moment Ebay made bidding habits private.

You don't have to be doing it to know this, you just have to be paying attention. Especially if you are a regular seller. I've banned several people from bidding when I've seen them step up the bids, only to retract at the top level.....then I later get an angry message from them asking why they are blocked when they try to put another bid in.

I explain the situation, and they always play dumb.

One time I even got soft and let a guy back in, only to see him repeat the same behavior again. I was pretty livid at the guy and myself for caving after that.

I get a message from a particular guy every couple months or so, wondering why he can't bid in any of my auctions. I just ignore it. I don't even remember if that's the reason he's on my blocked bidder list, but I assume it is because I can't find any record I had done business with him otherwise.

We have our own guy on Net54 who admitted using any tactic available to him to one up other bidders. Including racking up retractions on another type of collectible so his bid history looks as suspect as possible when bidding on baseball stuff.

I don't know if this type of bidding tactic actually works for anybody, but there's no doubt it's going on.

........and I'll say it for the millionth time, the easy fix for Ebay would be to limit retractions to a reasonable amount (say 2 a year, or some other arbitrary number), and a lot of this type of behavior.......along with a lot of actual shilling, would go away.

Ebay wants to hear none of this though. All they want are bids.........good, bad or fraudulent...they don't really care whether it hurts buyers, sellers, or both.

side note, my oddball bidder is no longer winning the item. of course there's 8 days left.

EDIT: he just dropped 6 bids and is now leading again.

Wowza. Can't believe you have to deal with crap like that.

I run 200-400 auctions a year on eBay and I've seen maybe 4 bid retractions over the past 8 years.

I don't mean to sound as if it's a common occurrence for me. If you are proactive about it from the beginning you can nip it in the bud pretty quickly.

I only run between, 1500-2000 individual auctions a year of mostly lower end stuff. Some of these outfits do that every day, so I imagine it's a bit harder to keep track of and much more prevalent.

Whether they actually do anything about it among their bidder base is up to them. Ultimately this should be Ebay's job, but they're not really interested in it.

I mean all you have to do is click around on the bid history of almost any higher end item that becomes available on Ebay. On a large portion of them you will come across bidders with significant retractions in their history. They are not all shillers, but they are certainly manipulating auctions without consequence.

One way or another, I think it's a crappy thing to do. 1 or 2 retractions because of a legitimate reason every once in awhile, fine........but we all know that's not what is being discussed here.

I usually have 200-300 auctions going at any time, it is very common for bidders to continue bidding incrementally until they top the high bid. I know none of these people doing this. I believe it started happening much more when ebay changed their bidding system to just press a button to leave another bid instead of having to actually enter a number and then bid again.

I actually turned ebay notifications on my phone off because of bidders like this. My phone would start dinging constantly.

Recently I bought a huge collection of 1:18 scale diecast cars and have been listing them about 50 per day every day this month and noticed a ton of bid retractions from the same suspects. I notified a couple of them to ask them why they were retracting so many bids and one guy said that I keep listing more desirable cars and he has a limited budget. Must not be too limited though because he has spent nearly $3000 with me this month. Another guy answered back "Sorry, will try not to do it again."

So I can tell you as a seller it's not always shilling when you see the incremental bids and the retractions.

I have something similar in an item I consigned to PWCC. One bidder (who does have quite a few retractions to his name) has bid on an item about 30 times, and he and another bidder are in a bit of a bidding war. On one hand I'm happy they are bidding, but on the other hand if I looked at the bidding history as a potential buyer I would question it (particularly since it is a consigned item.) I am not connected to any of the bidders (in case that wasn't obvious) and am a little concerned in case someone might retract their bid or something...

Yeah I just found out my bidder has 13 retractions in the last 6 months. Now I don't know whether or not to cancel his bids. I can't risk this item not selling. Now I remember why I went to fixed price sales...

Just found out something that's astounding to me. As a seller I don't have access to his canceled bid info! If I click on the bid history of the item I get a page with actual user names and if I click on those it takes me to his feedback page. That would explain why PWCC and the like don't weed these idiots out. Even if they had time to look at the bid history on 20,000 items it wouldn't tell them about the cancellations. Why wouldn't that info be available to the sellers???!!!

Attempting to find the "top" is one of the more useless auction behaviors I've noticed. However people do it, and it's one of those behaviors that people do exhibit.

+1 Some people have strange OCDs

It is. They just have to open up the auction in a different browser not logged in through their selling account. Or they could just CONVINCE EBAY TO ELIMINATE THESE BIDDERS, since they're in eBay's ear about how to improve the platform... but they have asked us message board dudes to inform them in the case of bizarre bidding and they have and will check it out.

I nip it in the bud by blocking bid retractors. NEVER has the reason been valid for the retraction. I don't put up with shenanigans.

I think I've retracted one bid in my life where I missed the decimal point typing in my bid. I immediately re-entered the bid with the decimal point in the right place. But I can't think of many other reasons besides an obvious typo, that could be legit.

not sure what your algebra means lol.

I think it means he retracted a bid once but agrees. I have been on the bay around 17 yrs and think I might have 1-2 retractions in total. I can't remember either had to have 1-2 LOL.....too many more than that and ebay needs to take a stand and boot people. That would help a lot.

I have an auction ending here very shortly. I have one bidder here with what looks like 50+ bids on this one item.

http://offer.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.d...STRK:MESE:BIDN

..

Actually only $1200, so I took a beating. And someone is playing similar games now with another auction. I have a 1986 fleer basketball set with PWCC it was at $2125, then that bid was retracted now it's back down to $1400. If this is a scare tactic it might work as it would certainly annoy me if I was a legit bidder.

Hide in plain sight! I like it!