PRIME RISKS OF EBAY

While I've more or less come to compromises about how to keep 
people happy while minimising exposure to the inevitable buyers who 
rip me off as a seller on Ebay, I'm still not so confident with the 
buying side of things.

Most of the stuff I buy on Ebay is business related and therefore 
often Buy It Now or Best Offer. However sometimes participating in 
auctions is necessary, especially for my new (and very slowly 
developing, mainly for lack of enthusiasm on my part) side line of 
being a dodgy used laptop seller. Here I just can't seem to find 
tactics that work for me.

What every other Ebay user seems to do is "snipe" in the last 
seconds. However my nerves just aren't up to this, partly the 
stress of watching all the bid activity at the last few seconds 
(though my internet isn't usually fast enough to actually see what 
happens at the end in real-time anyway), partly because my internet 
connection _loves_ to get flaky just as the end is approaching, and 
suddenly I'm punching the reload button frantically with only 
seconds to spare, but mostly because if giver half a chance I'll 
forget about the whole thing and never put a bid on in the first 
place. Placing excessive importance on things like this does not 
seem to help me remember them for some reason, and there's nothing 
more frustrating than remembering an hour late, checking, and 
seeing that the auction sold at 1/2 of the bid I was going to place.

There is also another problem with sniping in that I think 
sometimes when a rookie seller sees their item (or if I'm bidding 
on it, then most likely bulk lot of items) that they were expecting 
to get hundreds for still at the $1 starting bid within an hour of 
the deadline, they get cold feet and pull the listing. At least 
that's my conclusion from the extremely frustrating "this listing 
was ended by the seller" message.

So I put bids on early. But then there's the "how early?" 
predicament. To avoid the risk of forgetting, I'd like to put my 
bid on as soon as I see the listing. But that increases the search 
rankings and encourages more competition, as well as enticing 
bidders to set higher bids in competition against me later.

On the last listing I bid on, the seller added (late) a Buy It Now 
price, so that made the decision easy because bidding will cause 
the BIN option to disappear and therefore remove a temptation for 
other bidders to short-circuit the system (although if I'm 
comfortable with the BIN price I'll happily pick that in preference 
to all this bidding hassle). So I bid over a day before the end 
time, set for last night.

So yesterday I started up my laptop and checked my emails. True to 
form the connection went flaky mid-way through the POP retreival, 
and I ended up in exactly the state of suspense that I was trying 
to avoid, waiting for the last two emails to come through at about 
500B/s. Finally it got through the second-last one then stalled 
about 400 bytes from the end of the last message. So I checked the 
second-last one and was rewarded with a notice from Ebay saying 
that I'd been out-bid, and all the "increase your bid, don't let it 
get away" guff. Oh well, but by now the last message had finally 
sneeked through so I checked that and: "Oh, that's new!". It was a 
"bid retraction" notification saying that the bid from before had 
been retracted. Ah, OK, so I logged into ebay and sure enough I'd 
won the auction.

However checking the bid history (which strangely said "0 
Retractions" and showed no sign of me ever being out-bid, but Ebay 
never seems to work 100% anyway) I saw that the only other bidder 
was a zero feedback member who'd had no other bid activity in the 
last 30 days, and their bid had been put in five minutes after the 
notification about the bid retraction, about an hour before the 
auction ended. So it's pretty clear that the seller had made a fake 
account and bid on it themselves, first bidding ahead of me to see 
roughly where my maximum bid was set, then retracting that bid and 
bidding again just below my maximum (about $10 below, so at least I 
saved something).

This of course pisses me off, not least because if the seller had 
been honest then there wouldn't have been any other bid and I would 
have won for the starting price which was more than a factor of ten 
lower than the final amount. However at the end of the day it is 
still a price that I am comfortable with, so I'm not really 
inclined to make a fuss. It's proof above all of how honest people 
get nowhere in this world though, which makes me want to get 
further out of society altogether.

As for my tactics, it's clearly another mark against early bidding, 
but jeeze I seem to have no hope of finding a system that really 
works for me. Usually the auctions where nobody else bids are the 
only ones that I win, but now it turns out my tactics aren't even 
safe with those!

If I wasn't always seeking after money I wouldn't have to put 
myself through all this. Maybe I should just flip to to the other 
moral extreme and rob a bank? Do they even keep much money in banks 
now? Probably not now things are all online. OK, hack a bank. Ever 
see the 80s War Games rip-off movie Prime Risk? I bought an old 
ex-rental VHS copy of it in my teens (one of my first). Young guy 
falls for beautiful female electronics engineer, together they rob 
ATMs using a spectrum analyser to listen into RF-leaky pin-code 
keypads, then stumble upon a Russian spy ring and have to go on the 
run together - it's like the perfect movie plot for teenage me. 
That's how my life should have gone. :)

 - The Free Thinker