Wednesday, May 19, 2010
I can honestly say I've been on eBay since 1998 and I don't remember ever seeing an auction that collected 135 bids. The real question is do you think that this really could be Heinrich Himmler's ring as the seller suggests? Judging by the selling price its very possible that at least a few bidders were willing to take a chance on it! This list shows the top-5 selling items from the last week on eBay.
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Three bidders came up to the plate and were willing to spend $1500 or more on the bombsight. That was the lead off item for this run down of the best USA equipment in the WWII category. In fact every item included in this Top-5 list from last week sold for $1k or more. The crazy thing is if you take a close look at the #5 item I just can't fathom that it brought that kind of money. Anybody care to comment on that auction?
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
When you see an auction with forty or more bids what is usually happening is that a single bidder is responsible for 1/2 of those. I like to call it the "dink" strategy of bidding. You increase your bid by as little as $5 per bid hoping to just barely top out the high bidder. The interesting about these auctions is that you can never predict which items will strike up a bidding war. Take the top item in this list - who would think that the most competitive item in the category (based on bidding) would be a Swedish sling? Go figure! Here is something you can do just for run. I arranged these five auctions by the # of bids they received. Can you put them in order according to which ones sold for the most on eBay? Do that in your head real fast and then click on the links to see if you can confirm the guess. If you do well post it as a comment in response to this blog post.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
You know its bad when a user bids over 50 times in the same auction and loses! That is exactly what happened in the auction on the USMC captured Japan book. I can't say that I've read about the "incremental bidding" strategy in any of the forums or eBay chat rooms that I have visited. However, some bidders like to just keep dinking their bid up a few bucks over and over thinking that they need to slowly inch over the top. Many of these auctions saw some furious back and forth between just a few bidders in classic eBay auctions.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
If you keep a good watch on eBay you can pretty much follow the 7-day auctions that are the typical format used by sellers in the WWII Category of eBay. However, with tens of thousands of items listed in eBay Stores and with the popular 30 day fixed-priced option there are plenty of items that sell with only one "bid". Each of these top items from the last month sold with the buy-it-now option with most going for over $2k. There is another way to look at these sales. Some sellers utilize the "best offer" function to see if they can get any takers to step up to the plate. If you are a buyer you might have even entered an offer on a listing just to see how low the seller was willing to go. Can we take any lessons from the two items on this list that did sell using best offer? It looks like the sweet spot was between 76% and 78% of the asking price. While that's no golden rule it might give you some food for thought the next time you are in that situation.
