Ebay - How much shill bidding?

[Jesusjon]

Okay, since ebay made bidding anonymous, how much do you think shill bidding has increased? Bidding with other accounts, having friends bid on auctions, etc.

 

My sense is that it's increased a bunch, but I obviously can't prove it. Thoughts?

 

 

[Dumur]

Here's the thing. I don't think ebay cares. Why would they? They still get the insertion AND final value fees... and then if the shill bid wins the auction, they get them all over again if the person relists... so they have no reason to discourage it. WHat they should discourage is ending auctions early. That's where they lose out. As for the practice of it... I don't know. I you bid whatever you are willing to pay... sure it means I could have got it a little less, but in the end I am only bidding what I would have paid with a BIN anyway. I get more upset when I am bidding on an item and I am the high bidder and the person running the auction has NO IDEA what my high bid might have been and it get ended early and I see it pop up on someone's CAF a week later...

[Comicopolis]

You're right Ebay doesn't care as it pushes up their profits but I would guess that it has increased significantly in the items that I look at or bid on.

[Jesusjon]

Oh I know Ebay doesn't care -- it's just one more thing that inflates prices in the hobby.

[Artemaria]

Jon -

 

Good thread, but if anyone is shill bidding, I don't know if they will admit it in the open here . . .

 

Despite this, and everything I'm about to say of course, depends on the piece, but it seems to me that eBay remains one of the more affordable venues of our little hobby. Even eBay's much maligned fees are still lower than those of other venues (at least for the buyer), and it seems to me that even though there are many more eyeballs on eBay than some other places, the prices on eBay don't match those realized in private sales or even on some other more exclusive auction venues.

 

But there really is no way to confirm shill bidding unless you get the list of bidders from the seller and can correlate the eBay identifications with the actual names of people. With some it will be easy, but with others, less so.

 

Anyway, good luck, and I hope your inquiry is more based on a philosophical quest for knowledge rather than the feeling you got shilled.

 

Best regards.

 

- A

 

 

[Dumur]

Yeah, I am always surprised at some of the prices realized at places like Heritage compared to ebay. I guess some people don't check ebay all that often (though I wish I could say that about myself) and so they just wait for the "big" auctions at the main auction houses. But I still see "not so good" panel pages go for $30-$40 + the buyer's premium (another $9 on Heritage on pieces of that price) and seeing the same types of pages (sometimes the SAME pages) go for $10-$15 on ebay... and you can't really shill on those sites, because you could get absolutely screwed... and they prices still seem to go higher, so I wonder if shilling really does affect much. Like I said, if there isn't at least one other person willing ot go that high then it doesn't really matter. Doesn't make it any less annoying, but...

[Meeley Man]

I can't say if shill bidding on eBay has increased recently or not. I do know most of their new policies to make the site "better" certainly leaves the opening for that to be a real possibility, though.

 

But it seems to me that eBay isn't concerned at all with fairness, anyway. At least, not unless it hinders their own profit margins. I know I'm rarely buying anything off them currently. And as far as selling, unless I simply wanted to be rid of the item for almost nothing, there's no way I'd use them. They have become the most "seller unfriendly" auction site online, IMO.

[Jesusjon]

Yeah, this is just academic wondering. I wouldn't be surprised to see a nice class action lawsuit against Ebay for making shilling so easy and taking so little action against it. Then we could all join the suit and get back about $25 each for our troubles!

 

[PhilipCohen-migration]

For anyone interested, a detailed case study of a classic, blatant shill bidder on eBay, and a comment on eBay’s attitude thereto, at http://www.auctionbytes.com/forum/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=24033

[NelsonAI]

Nice article. Thanks for the link.

 

It's not just ebay. You have shill bidding at the regular auction houses as well.

 

Cheers!

N

 

 

[jbud73]

I have to say that even though the new Ebay policies over the past two years have made it easier to shill (and I'd venture that has equated to more shilling), it is still far easier to shill a Heritage, ComicLink or Pedigree auction.

 

On Ebay you can still see who the final winner was and look up the approximate number of transactions of the bidders and how many items they have bid on with a particular seller. Now seeing the Ebay id's of all bidders made it far easier to detect shilling to see who was bidding on what etc etc. But Ebay is still more public than any other comics auction site out there BY FAR. But maybe that's the sad thing

 

Again the rule here is don't let previous sales rule your decision making process, consider them, but don't treat them as biblical, because there are still a too many factors that are unregulated to not allow for shenanigans to take place in open collectibles auctions.