I agree there are shill bidders and they usually to be found where the seller has  private listings for bidders. It is very hard to determine if a bidder is shill bidding. 

As for sniping, that is where the bids come in at the last 5 -10 seconds of the auction. There is no question there is a huge amount of sniping on ebay. A popular item will shoot up a few hundred pounds in the last few seconds. If you leave a maximum bid on a popular item ( item with many bidders and high interest)  you will get pushed quite high in the final few seconds. This is sniping and not shill bidding. 

Maximums do work, so leave a bid at a fair price and you can still win. Let's not forget many sellers get next to nothing for their items too. They do not always get fair prices. 

A reasonable maximum in the last few seconds is  the most common form of bidding, but shills know all the tricks and could if they wanted a higher price, a shill can enter high maximums to generate a frenzy in the last few seconds. 

It's hard for a shill to work  on items that have little interest. They cannot do their work on low interest items. With low interest items then it is best to simply leave a bid and maybe a few pounds above as a maximum. That way the shill can either buy it or let you have it. If indeed there is a shill. 

Sometimes you just have to let something go if you feel it is getting above what you think is a good price. I am always happy to see items go at high prices, i am never happy to see them sell at low prices. So if a shill gets the price high then i do not care. It is just another item i can cross of my wanted list. When i really want something and it is at a good price it bothers me and when i see the price go high then i am happy because i am satisfied i could never afford that item. 

However i have to seriously consider buying an item if it's really good bargain otherwise someone else may get it. I do not want them to get it either 🙂 So if the prices goes high then i don't want it and i am happy they can have it.

Hello ErrolL

"The problem with Supioduo's approach is what to do if one wins the item at an inflated price as a result of shill bidding".

That isn't quite what I mean't. I probably didn't explain. If you bid at the price you want to pay at a maximum and then inform the dealer of that fact you won't have been "shilled". As it were. The dealer would have bid himself up and you would have lost so no need to worry about not paying. The dealers friend would have bought the piece and the dealer either re lists it or contacts you directly with an offer at that price you wanted to pay originally. Perfect no?. Shill bidding only works if you take the bait. That's why Julia's approach works for her. She puts in one fixed bid. Sometimes she wins and sometimes loses. If the piece was shilled up and she sees the item re listed which happens all the time she can even contact the dealer and offer her previous bid again. Dealers don't like stock just sitting around. If your original bid was reasonable they may just take your bait and like that you've hooked them and not the other way around. If he says no. Walk on and find another piece. There's always something else to buy. Best wishes

I do often leave a maximum bid as opposed to a one-off bid, the thing is I just place the one bid.  The other good thing about bidding late is that it gives me time to decide if I really want something!  Sometimes I find I don't, which is quite interesting.  

Thank you Supioduo! My problem is that I usually bid a maximum amount that is realistic but higher than I really expect to pay for the piece. So if a shill bidder at the last moment doubles the price to just below my maximum bid I'm paying more than I really expected to. I agree that I should therefore set the maximum bid lower to avoid this happening and I have started doing that. I agree too that if one is outbid by a shill bidder one can easily contact the seller and just mention that if the piece is not paid for one would be interested in obtaining it and then negotiate a price if the seller is interested in doing that.

S-D I agree with you too. I think sniping, which I assume is sometimes computer generated as a paid service for the buyer by a company,  is common with items of great interest to many. There is nothing wrong, improper, unethical or illegal about that. I have mostly been annoyed by the situations, as represented by the seller I mentioned, where an item of low interest is bid up by shill bidders  who are listed as private bidders with undisclosed identities and who then come in at the last moment to push up the price still further.

I think eBay should disconinue allowing bidders to have private undisclosed identities. If bidders' identities are partly disclosed, as they are for most auctions, a lot of useful information can be derived. This would include distinguishing between dealers and private collectors, and seeing how often a particular bidder bids on an item etc. We need more transparency in this area.

I agree also about walking away if one sees an item getting to a point where it is above what one wishes to pay for it. I often do that too.

Anyway we will never solve all of these problems here. I'm glad, however, that I started this thread since it has generated a helpful discussion which might throw some light on a dark corner of eBay bidding.

Best regards,

Errol

If there is an item and a bidder really likes it, then they have the bid panel open and  at the last 3.5 seconds they can not just bid higher put instead place a high bid or high max bid. Higher than they would ever want to pay but with the purpose to prevent other snipers from out bidding them.

This can be very effective and you can out bid that hidden automatic bid (max) left by another bidder and win or even better leave 1 frustrated sniper behind who is not fats enough to out bid your final bid. 

The danger here though and i have seen this happen, is that other bidders will push you to your limit within that 3,5 seconds.  You will be like cream in a half full coffee cup that has a high powered nozzle of hot steamed milk  filling the cup and you might get pushed to the top,  above the price you would be prepared to pay to be satisfied that you got a good deal. 

That is because the majority of bidding ( 65%) that i have seen now happens in the last 5 seconds. In other words many times 65% of the price is reached in the last 3- 5 seconds.

However it would be foolish not to have a few pounds set above your maximum. So that you can survive a 1 pound or in the case of a more expensive  item a 5 pound increment bid. 

I think all these reasons are why 65% of price movement occurs in the last 3 -5 seconds because to avoid maximums people prefer to be there at the bell and hammer a price....and you still will be tempted to throw in a very high maximum to block all the small bidders, and frustrate small increment snipers.  

However you might also get pushed to the top by all that pressure and that is not shills, it just people doing the same, and also trying to get it at the last high price they have in mind. 

I rarely encounter shills and i do no trust private identity bids.  Seller with private identity bidders are usually the worst shills. I have had multiple items of a private identity bid/seller in watch list and my watch list goes all the way to 300 (max) so when this Chinese geezer came on i had  scores of his items in my watch list and at 7.30 am Beijing time, this guys comes online and shill bids all his items up at the same fricking time 🙂

My watch list sequentially noted each bid. You can argue it was another bidder, but i have experience and know it was the sellers shill account. This is haggling in the market type of stuff from a different culture. 

However I did manage to get the evidence that this is a form of shill bidding, I had strong evidence enough to learn how it works. Not enough to report that seller ( never is) . Also you might note shills always have  the seller use private identity listed. In a way they have to shill or they would go bankrupt 🙂 

The Chinese approach to ebay is shilling and they try get postage and a small profit. They are actually not  greedy. However if i wanted to go to the market in Beijing and haggle 🙂  ahh chinese are the best.  I do respect their perspective. I am sure many  Chinese seller has gone bankrupt by following ebay policy and not to mention being conned by unscrupulous European fraudsters. They have traditions and haggling seems to be how they conduct business so to me it seems quite innocent.

However the UK sellers are the most honest in the world, so i never encounter nay shill bidding with uk sellers. 

Hello S-D:

Although one should never generalize, I have found that sellers in the UK, the Netherlands and in Sweden are very honest and ethical. I have never seen shill bidding there. One excellent Netherlands eBay seller does tend to overprice items by setting very high reserve prices for auctions. However, that is his choice and is perfectly acceptable as a business practice and buyers/bidders can just walk away. Shill bidding is I think a more serious problem in the USA. I think eBay could go a long way towards reducing the problem by not allowing sellers to have the option of keeping bidders' identitites secret or undisclosed. I can see absolutely no reason for that. Even without it, no bidders' names are actually disclosed in most auctions, so why is it necessary to have the addional option of totally undisclosed bidders? This does not provide bidders with any additional protections. Unless I am missing something, its sole purpose is to enable unscrupulous sellers to shill bid and do all manner of things that they don't want to be exposed to the light of day. So by allowing this unnecessary option eBay is essentally a co-conspirator in price fixing.

Best regards,

Errol

Dear all,

I may be totally wrong, but to me it is not normal that some sellers with high reputation do have bids increasing day after day since the beginning.

I do not think that it is normal. I can understand bidders with very low feedbacks, hence not well aware of how eBay works, but how in the hell one should bid thousands of dollars on the second day of the listing instead of the last seconds?

I repeat, I may be off, but when thinking about shill bidding, those are the first ones that come to my mind.

Dear Short Dong, it must be matter of coincidence, but the worst experiences that I had has been with UK sellers. ? But I do not want to generalize, everywhere there are good and bad guys.

To me, it is a fact that eBay has a sort of racist policy, some Countries are better treated than others.

It happened two times to me in the past of buying an item from two different UK sellers that, once in hand, I see that they were obvious fake. By contacting the sellers, in both cases I had no answer at all. This simple, highly unpolite and irritating fact, should be enough, in my opinion, for ebay to reprobate them.

Instead, by starting a refund procedure, I have been requested by ebay to prove by means of an official expertise that the items were fake.

Now, if that is the procedure, why if I have a refund request for really absurd reason (a Kangxi dish believed damaged because the thickness of the glaze was not perfectly even. Yes, it is true!!!!) by a Chinese buyer I am forced to accept the refund, I have no other options? Ebay’s policies are not the same from Country to Country. That is a form of stupid racism, sorry.

In my case, refund is highly costly. My items go mainly to China or USA. When ebay force me to accept the refund (a propos: why ebay let sellers the choice to not accepting refund if after that force you to accept it? Another stupid thing) I have to pay the shipping costs, which are expensive because of the distance, plus Custom fees because for the Custom I am importing the good from a no European Country. Crazy.

BTW, 90% of antiquities on ebay are fake, and obviously ebay knows that very well. But money… you know, it is the same old story.

Giovanni

Hello again Giovanni:

I too have noticed that with some auctions bidding to quite high levels starts very early in the auction period. Sometimes, this appears justifiable if an item is extremely rare and beautiful. In other cases where more mundane and average pieces are up for auction, there seems no good reason for anyone to bid early and this does raise the question of shill bidding as in the case of the seller I referred to at the beginning of this thread. As you know, Peter always recommends leaving a bid. I think that is good advice if one is forgetful. However, in my case, I only put eBay items that I am especially interested in on my watch list and I have never forgotten when they will be up for auction. I print out the eBay page and write the date and time of the auction on it. If I decide to bid, I then bid, as you do, in the last few minutes of the auction. So I have never felt the need to leave a bid early unless, as in two recent UK auctions, the pieces I was interested in, came up for auction at 4:30 a.m. my time when I was fast asleep! Incidentally, I won both auctions having left a maximum bid when i went to bed a few hours earlier.

I really doubt that eBay is prejudiced against certain countries or ethnic groups. I think many of their policies are just silly and not thought through adequately. In the example you quote, if a buyer claims an item arrives damaged, I think eBay considers that a reason for a refund to be granted automatically provided that the buyer documents the damage. I had one case in which a recumbent jade horse arrived with one leg broken off. I started a dispute process through PayPal and got my money back after PayPal found in my favor. I have always used PayPal for disputes and they seem to have a good process. I have never tried to dispute an item through eBay.

In your example, you claimed that you had been sent a fake piece and eBay wanted an expert to verify that. I can see why they might do that because a buyer who gets an item and does not like it could easily claim that an item was fake even though that was untrue and eBay presumably lacks the expertise to make a judgement. It's a much easier call for them if one sends them a few photographs showing a jade horse's leg broken off, for example. I'm not trying to make excuses for eBay. I'm just trying to suggest reasons other than prejudice for their actions.

It's odd that even sellers who state that items are not returnable unless they arrive not as described can be forced to accept a return and issue a refund. I suppose though that this is where the fake issue comes in. Many years ago, I made a really stupid  impulse buy of a monochrome blue flambe moon flask. The seller was one of those types who sell all sorts of miscellaneous junk and I obviously did a stupid thing. When the flask arrived it seemed awful. Peter was kind enough to confirm that it was a modern fake. I then contacted the seller through eBay  and she agreed to refund what I had paid, but preferred to do it directly outside of eBay.  She sent me a check and I returned the item. She was by no means a crook. She just had no knowledge and had described the item as an early Qing item, 18th century by doing a little Internet research.

I'm sorry you have all these problems. It's clear from this thread that both buyers and sellers confront frequent problems on eBay. I always report problems, but eBay has no feedback mechanism unlike Catawiki did when i compalined about an item recently in one of the threads on this Forum. They answered my complaint and the reason for the problems to my satisfaction in two emails.

Regards,

Errol

I don't think its generally 90%. However, some areas seem to attract more fake activity than others and clearly the Asian ceramics market is perhaps the world leader in falsification. It could be even more than 90% in this field making buying a nightmare for any ordinary folk just wanting a pretty bowel. Nonetheless the amount of falsifications in any antique market are high. I visit a local warehouse occasionally and I can tell you that 80% of the European articles on offer are "not" of the period......But listen to this. Every six months or so arrives a buyer from Iran and he buys nearly the whole place in one lot. He has it rammed into a container and off to Tehran it goes. All being sold as period pieces while I know its all false......Funny old world isn't it........Best wishes All and Everyone.