WTF is it with EBay?

[jbsegal]

Does anyone still sell anything on ebay by _Auction_ anymore? The last {N} things I've looked up have all been "Buy It Now!" only.

WTF's the point??

... and, while I see a way to limit my searches to ONLY BIN sales, is there any way to exclude them?

<lt;sigh&gt;

Comments

[jim-p.livejournal.com]

When you do a search, you should see three tabs near the top of the page: All Items, Auctions, and Buy It Now. If you click on auctions it will eliminate BIN-only items (though it will show auctions for which there is a BIN option)

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

I suppose the real question is why there are so many BIN-only sales and so few auctions. (at least in the items I'm looking at.

[coraline]

because that way people who are using ebay as their way to retail stuff don't have to wait for an auction to close to get a buyer -- with interchangable commodity stuff, there's not a huge amount of variability in sales price, so quick turnover is much more important.

i assume you're looking at electronics or consumer goods -- if you look at clothing or shoes or (hm, why would i think of this) loose gemstones, you'll find a larger mix of BIN and auction. (or art noveau flatware. not that i'd know anything about this.)

so far as i can tell, the more unique a thing is, the more likely it is to be by auction.

[much-ado.livejournal.com]

as far as i can tell, it has to do with vendors not wanting to risk winning auctions coming it at less than the vendor's perceived value of the item on sale. why more vendors don't just put a reserve price on an item is beyond me, but having grown up in the antique-dealing world and attended more than my fair share of real-time auctions, i know that vendors are sometimes disappointed by the low auction sale price of an item.

ergo, BIN sales are a way of getting the perceived value without the risk of underselling themselves (and without having to go through the hassles of setting up a reserve, or turning down winning auctions that still don't meet the reserve, etc.)

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

So why not have both?
As an auction buyer, I know that I might lose something to a BIN buyer. As a BIN buyer, I know that someone might pay less for it...

But when there are 20 of an item and they're all BINd at the same price, it's not worth coming to ebay to look for it.

[coraline]

But when there are 20 of an item and they're all BINd at the same price, it's not worth coming to ebay to look for it.

why?
(i'm not seeing why this makes ebay less useful to you, especially since you have the option of only looking at auctions if you want)

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

(i'm not seeing why this makes ebay less useful to you, especially since you have the option of only looking at auctions if you want)

No I don't. I can select auctions AFTER the search has run, but I can't do an initial search ONLY for auctions (or 'Auctions and BIN'), while I CAN search for 'BIN only'.

If there are only BIN results, I don't want to see them.... Amazon probably has whatever it is cheaper.

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

(Or if I do, I can't find where... hence the question in the original post)

[coraline]

hm. i didn't know it was possible to do an initial search on BIN only -- i always just used the tabs after my search ran.

i guss we use ebay for very different things -- if amazon has what i want at all, it's certainly not going to be cheaper (i'm thinking camera stuff here -- BIN vendors on ebay are essentially always cheaper.)

[luckylefty.livejournal.com]

Bots and auto-bidders and such don't help people win auctions; the auction just goes to whoever bids the most.

Let's suppose the current high bid on something is $5, and you decide you're willing to pay up to $30, so you put in a bid of $30, and are then current high bidder at $6. Someone else is willing to bid $20, and rather than just placing a bid of $20, uses some fancy bots and autobidders. 3 milliseconds before the auction closes, the bots put down a flurry of last-minute bids. As a result, what will happen? You get the item for $21.

Now suppose that there's another item, but this time you're only willing to pay $20. Once again, you put in a bid, and are the high bidder at $6. This time, the person who uses fancy bot-software tells his bots to bid up to $30. Two nanoseconds before the auction ends, his bots put in a flurry of bids, and he wins the auction for $21. You think "He won the auction because he used the evil bots!", but the bots had nothing to do with it. He was willing to pay up to $30, and you had no interest in paying $30, so there was no way you were getting the item regardless of whether he used bots or not.

You say you hate it when someone wins an auction by making a last-minute bid, but if you'd be willing to bid a few dollars more, then you should have bid a few dollars more. If you say "my maximum bid is $20", then you should imagine a screen that says "If someone has a bot that's going to bid $21 at the last second, would you like us to bid $22 for you?". If the answer is "yes", then that's exactly what a bid of $22 means, and you should make it. Bidding $20 means "If someone bids $21, I do not want to bid $22".

If your maximum bid is $20, and there is only one other person interested in that price, and they are willing to bid more than $20, they will get the item for $21. Just as they don't know your maximum bid, you don't know theirs. You may feel "Oh, I could have had it for just a few dollars more", but you have no way of knowing that to be true; it's actually unlikely. If they were willing to bid $100, the result will be that they get the item for $21. So you will percieve the result as "I just barely got outbid", but it's much more likely that they were actually willing to pay far more than you for the item, and you were never going to get it no matter what.

[frotz.livejournal.com]

How's that? Once you put in a bid (over the reserve, if there is one), the BIN option is gone and you can't lose it to a BIN buyer. If it's below the reserve price, the bid is subsequently meaningless anyway.

As a seller, I launch everything by auction, with no BIN price. I'm generally looking for the market to tell me what something is worth, if anything, and my minimum price is "worth it to put in a box and ship instead of just throwing away", and the sort of stuff I sell is mostly in the "unique and weird" category, where I'm happy to make a buck off of it and also happy if there's someone else in the world who will want it. If I happen to hit some weird niche where my stuff is worth oodles, so much the better. Mostly I consider ebay the most diverse market available, and listing stuff is damn near free.

[gravitrue.livejournal.com]

no way.

The auction does go to whoever bid the most,
but bid bots clearly help win auctions.

When I want to buy something, I don't think "How much am I willing to pay?" is nearly as useful a question as "How much can I get this for?"

An ebay auction is a dynamic system; your bidding behavior influences other people's. If you wish to get the item for the amount that you are willing to pay for it (or less), the correct strategy to pursue is one that inhibits competition from other bidders. A dynamic auction like ebay (as opposed to a sealed-bid auction) is specifically designed to cause people to bid more for items; this is obviously successful as I regularly see people bid more for ebay items than the current retail cost from reputable mail-order houses.

If ebay were a sealed-bid system (everyone submits only one bid, all bids are opened together, highest wins) then your analysis would be relevant. As is, when you bid, you stimulate others to do so, with a strong emotional component which will cause price volatility and/or inflation.

[gravitrue.livejournal.com]

Precisely!

If you are looking for something unusual, all the buy-it-now stuff is annoying noise in the display. This might seem trivial, but as the proportion of buy-it-now items goes up, signal-to-noise deteriorates. Since many of my searches generate over a thousand results (i.e. there is no easy way to search for them) signal to noise is important.

If you want a traditional american fixed-price retail transaction, buy-it-now is clearly what you want, as a buyer or seller. It's cool for that, and for some stuff that's what I want; buy-it-now is not inherently bad or anything.

But, ebay's U.I. implementation lets you filter for one, but not the other.
And, the signal to noise issue has a snowball effect; as the unusual items become harder to find, they also become harder to sell, so there is less reward in selling them, so people stop offering them on ebay, taking us back to the more irritating time of having to troll around for years searching for a rare item, and with the added difficulty that ebay has pulverized much of the infrastructure that used to exist for finding things.

For example, hamfests and photo shows have greatly reduced populations, and pawn shops barely exist in the north-east any more. Computer junk stores have also become fewer. Many of these were on the wane before ebay, but ebay greatly sped up the decline.

Many items are slowly finding other channels; every common model of car now has one or more owner/enthusiast sites, and I've yet to see one that didn't include a forsale board. When I want a glove box door or a stainless steel muffler for a mid-nineties car, that's where I go, not ebay. I rather prefer the decentralized nature in many ways; no reason for ebay to get all the money. But it is more work, and for many things a substitute has not occurred; ain't no place I can easily find a punch card knife any more.

Of course, ebay could have held on to this traffic, but as an organization, they are pretty dumb. I could cite a bunch of examples of lazy or poor coding or design on their part, but this post is long enough. Of course, the collectible stuff is probably less margin for them then just being a landlord to a dedicated population of ten-thousand-item selling "Building 19" types, so it may be in their short-term interest to be stupid.

[gravitrue.livejournal.com]

(I'm mentioning this mainly to help y'all save money;
it's not really ebay-relevent).

BIN sellers may be cheaper than amazon for new camera stuff, but are often close to or more than NYC mail-order. For used items, used camera dealers are often cheaper than ebay and have return policies to boot. It does depend somewhat on supply and demand of that particular item.

Examples:
When I bought my maxxum 5D body three months ago, ebay prices were $100 higher than what I paid, though they have now settled to the point where if I wanted to futz with bid bots, spend about a week waiting to nail the deal, and was willing to deal with grey market warranty issues, I could get it for around $50-$80 less. Warrenty issue alone mean ebay probably won't really be cheaper until around June, when distributers will be closing out the model in order to prepare for the replacement model that's due out over the summer.

Within the past two months, Adorama sold a kenko .15x accessory teleconverter for around $30. This lens went out of production about thirty years ago and is getting very popular right now; limited supply, increasing demand, prices are rising. I expect demand will rise even more when people start to realize that this lens was what got used for HAL's eyes in 2001: A Space Odyssey. I missed the one at Adorama and got mine for $65 on ebay a couple of weeks ago. Buy-it-now prices this week are $125 and rising, reserves over $80. If Adorama gets in another one this month, though, they likely will not yet have noticed the extent of the price rise and will sell it for $60. The reverse is true with items dropping in price; the storefront and mail-order retailers won't drop their prices as fast as the market drops. Thus the glut of bronicas and mamiya TLR's at most such places.

[coraline]

...which is why i bought my new lens from a NYC mail-order place. i do tend to check both -- sometimes one is a win, sometimes another.

(although they just called me and fast-talked me and after doing a little bit of research i think i just got scammed -- not i gotta cancel my order. gr.)

[gravitrue.livejournal.com]

to explain what I think JB meant, since I seem to be in firehose mode at the moment...

if you are a shopper on an item with both bidding and BIN,
for bidding, you want to wait to bid til near the end (actually there are probably other strategies, I just haven't thought them out yet) as I wrote about earlier, but you then risk someone else BIN'ing (look, a new verb!) before that time.

if you BIN instead, you have sacrificed the margin between the reserve and the BIN price in order to guarentee getting the item. I'm pretty sure that this (essentially charging a premium to avoid having to deal with competitive bidding) was the original thinking behind BIN, and the "oh wait, we don't need to allow bidding at all, just like conventional u.s. retail" came later, and is now the tail that wags the dog.

[coraline]

thanks -- i was trying to formulate a response to that, but that's way more coherent than anything i came up with.

[coraline]

But, ebay's U.I. implementation lets you filter for one, but not the other.

are you saying that you're unable to use their UI to see only auction items, or just that it's not as easy as you'd like? because it's easy to filter for only-auction-items, though it does take another click.

[gravitrue.livejournal.com]

First, count your limbs, then your family members.
--Another Fine Myth advice for doing deals with the Deeva

whoa. dude. have you ever really looked at your web browser?

[gravitrue.livejournal.com]

Score: long-haired scientist 1, fuzzy-headed geeks, 0.

JB, somehow neither you nor I noticed that tab!
The answer is at hand, or at mouse, or something.

Well, as they say, if you want answers from the net,
an incorrect assertion often does better than a
carefully crafted query.

Re: whoa. dude. have you ever really looked at your web browser?

[coraline]

i TRIED to say that a couple times above, but apparently it didn't stick (or maybe JB did figure it out, but you hadn't. dunno.)

anyways, yeah, ebay is dumb, but they're not THAT dumb. i usually filter selectively for "only BIN, i'm feeling impatient" or "only auction" depending on what i'm looking for.

[frotz.livejournal.com]

Ahh, I see. Personally, my strategy with BIN items that I think I want to bid normally on is to put in the minimum bid straight away to kill the BIN option, and then put in my real bid later.

That's a bit more problematic when there's a reserve price involved, since the minimum bid isn't clear, but it's still possible to bid up to it in increments. Annoying, though, and I usually don't bother with reserve auctions at all, since the reserve is almost universally too high, and generally the sign of a seller who isn't sure they really want to sell, and is instead just wasting my time as a potential buyer.

Re: whoa. dude. have you ever really looked at your web browser?

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

I'm still not seeing it, on either the front page or the advanced search page. I know about the Auctions tab AFTER the search. THat's not what I want.

On the adv page:
Show only
Buy It Now items
Items listed with PayPal
Get it Fast items
Gift Services Gift items
Giving Works Item eBay Giving Works items
Search for items that benefit nonprofit organizations.
Best Offer
Ad Format listings
Store Inventory Items
Listings
Change to date range

and 'au' doesn't appear. (On the front page, it's only in the 'Live Auctions' 'store'.)

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

I disagree.

While your actions may influence irrational bidders, I think the only sane way to do the auction thing is by deciding the most you are willing to pay and bidding that. If you don't get it, c'est la vie.

Bidding wars aren't worth it.

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

Once you put in a bid (over the reserve, if there is one), the BIN option is gone and you can't lose it to a BIN buyer.

Ah. That I did not know... not that it changes anything much, as most of what I was ranting against was the lack of auctions in favor of BIN-only, but it's good to know.

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

My only strategy is "pick the most I'm willing to pay and bid it". That said, bidding small to kill the BIN and THEN upping the offer seems like it might be wise.

Re: whoa. dude. have you ever really looked at your web browser?

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

See my reply to Coraline's reply to this comment.

Re: whoa. dude. have you ever really looked at your web browser?

[coraline]

right -- i think gravitrue didn't know about the auctions tab at all -- i think i'd realized that you just wanted it in the original search-level, which i agree you can't do right now, which is dumb.
but it is only one more click -- it doesn't bother me much.

Re: whoa. dude. have you ever really looked at your web browser?

[madbodger.livejournal.com]

So make your own front page like I did.

Re: whoa. dude. have you ever really looked at your web browser?

[gravitrue.livejournal.com]

Yep. I knew it wasn't a search criteria,
and never thought to look for a post-search
option.