Here is the secret-
if you enter your bid with some time remaining, all interested parties
have a chance to discover what your bid is and bid a little more.
Let's say you were willing to bid $200 on an item, and you did that with
2 days to go. Someone else might have been interested but they wanted
to buy the item for $190. They bid $190 and get outbid. They go away
and think about it, they decide they are willing to pay a little more so
they bid $196, and get outbid. After awhile they decide they are
willing to bid a little more so they bid $205, and ebay bids for them up
to $201 and they win the item. If you entered your $200 in the last 10
seconds of the auction they would have bid $190, you would have bid
$200, ebay would have bid $191 for you and you would have won because
the auction would have ended before they would have had time to think
about it further.
I have bid on lots of things where I entered what I thought would be a
good bid, but I was not able to be around at the end of the auction, and
later discovered that the winning bid was $0.50 or $1.00 more than my
bid. My bid was basically a sitting duck, for everybody to shoot at.
> 4 days later when I got the e-mail I was a little shocked at the
> final bid of $430 but I got the switch with room to spare on my bid,
> it really went up over those 4 days. Usually (99.9999%) my bids are
> much more reasonable and I walk away and wait for my e-mail, I have
> NEVER understood this waiting until the last few seconds and will not
|