eBay Listing The Best Kept Secret of How to Win on eBay

[mrrsm]

This technique may or may not be well known or familiar to those of us with eBay accounts and for those of sitting on the fence about signing up because the way things work on eBay can be a bit strange, This information I am recounting was not my original idea but something I stumbled upon as a brand new member on a weird Blogger who let its slip while I was sorting out the place. But since trying it out and adopting it, I have had such ENORMOUS success with using this method that I think one particular experience is worth telling everyone about to prove the efficacy of the idea:

For almost 25 years... right up until he recently lost his fight with cancer, my next door neighbor -=Bob=- was one of those poor souls who just LOVED tools of all kinds... but when it came time to use them...he was a an absolute DISASTER! Invariably, all of his application of tools would always make matters worse and more complicated and often create terrible outcomes. Over time, a late phone call or a knock on the door at all hours of the day and night would precede me becoming inveigled in his rescue... no matter what the crisis... and because he suffered because he was who he was... I could never bring myself to refuse him.

In this particular instance, Bob got it into his head that he could take a piece of galvanized threaded pipe and screw it, along with a stubby elbow right into the side of his fairy expensive 26 HP Intek V-Twin riding lawnmower engine and put a square nosed plug without any sealing tape into what he ostensibly wanted as "An easy way to drain the oil..." Unfortunately... every last drop of engine oil leaked out of his Gerry-rigged apparatus while he was riding merrily around cutting his grass and then...THIS happened:

http://s557.photobucket.com/user/60dgrzbelow0/library/INTEKATASTROPHE?sort=3&page=2

He asked me to look out in the driveway and examine the engine and during the tear-down, it became very obvious that there would be no rescue on this occasion...at least ...that is what I thought until I asked him if he had called the manufacturer to get a price on a replacement motor..."Yes... I did that already... Briggs & Stratton said that the new motor would cost $1,700.00..." I winced at the price of his mistake and as I tried to console him... an inspirational Light Bulb went off inside my head...and I asked him, "Bobby... if I can find you a motor good enough to replace this one using my account on eBay... how high would you be willing to bid?" He pondered my suggestion and finally said, "Well, Bob... if you can get one for around $650.00, I suppose I could swing it." I got a commitment from him that he would reimburse me well before my PayPal bill arrived during the month...and we shook on it.

Well... I immediately went on-line and scoured eBay for a few minutes...and Low and Behold... How does that Old Saying go? Oh yeah..."God takes care of Drunks, FOOLS and Babies..." and in this case... there was a 27 HP Intek that came off of a Husqvarna Demo Model Unit located at a huge Professional Yard Maintenance and Supply Store up in Ocala, Florida...and the bidding was about to close in about three hours from the time I spied the situation when the bids were right $200.00 or so.

NOW... THIS IS WHERE THE TECHNIQUE COMES INTO THE DISCUSSION AND ACTUAL OUTCOME:

The way to WIN on eBay is to do the following things:

LURK ON THE ITEM, BUT TAKE NOT ACTION TO REVEAL YOU ARE THERE
NEVER BEGIN BIDDING, OR COUNTER-BIDDING ON AN ITEM FOR ANY REASON, WHATSOEVER
NEVER RELY UPON AUTOMATIC BIDDING FOR ANY REASON, GUYS LIKE ME WILL BEAT YOU!
WAIT UNTIL THE VERY LAST THIRTY SECONDS OF THE FINAL TIME TO BID...
WATCH VERY CAREFULLY FOR ANY REALLY BIG JUMPS IN BID VALUE AND DO NOT BID IF TOO HIGH!
IF THE PRICE IS RISING BY TINY INCREMENTS THEN PLACE A BID 3 x TIMES AS MUCH OF THE VALUE
...AND YOU WILL WIN THE ITEM... BUT YOU WILL NOT HAVE TO PAY WHAT YOU BID!
--BECAUSE THERE WON'T BE ENOUGH TIME FOR ANYONE TO BID HIGH ENOUGH TO WIN
-AND IF YOU WAIT AS LONG AS YOU CAN... YOU WON'T TRIGGER A BIG JUMP IN THE PRICE
.YOU WILL ONLY PAY THE INCREASES THAT A FEW STRAGGLERS MANAGE TO GET IN...
-- YOU WILL ALWAYS WIN BECAUSE YOU WILL BEAT WHOEVER THE LAST BIDDER WAS !
-- WHEN YOU TRY THIS THE FIRST TIME AND YOU WIN, YOU WILL LAUGH AND CRY OUT LOUD!

I will admit that my heart was pounding like a trip hammer as the final minutes... so when the final 30 seconds was counting down, I put in my maximum bid for $650...and when the sale finalized and closed...I managed to get him an almost brand new Husqvarna Intek 27 HP Motor for only $360.00... including free shipping...and although I had to manufacture a hybrid power pulley to mate this more powerful engine with a thicker crankshaft take off connection, in the end it worked. Regarding the video... please don't be disappointed with Bob's less than appreciative and surly manners... by the time I shot this video, he was suffering from extensive Chemo-Brain and I had to take that in stride. Anyhow, that is how things worked out. The technique works... just make damned sure to wait as long as you can...because there are those rare moments where if you see a tripling in the final bids that would break your budget...shine that one on ...because on eBay... there is ALWAYS another "BBD" (Bigger and Better Deal") Happy Bidding!

 

[northcreek]

You are lucky that none of the other bidders had sniper apps. I have manually sniped as close as six seconds and been beat by those things...Mike

 

[mrrsm]

The "Sniper's" that use Windows applications and the Android Snipers will still have to bid greater than my 3X bid to get the win...and most of those programs actually do the opposite of my technique by minimally bidding something like $00.07 at a pop to try and just squeeze past any potential bids that gave them their last second indicators. My technique blows them out of the water because they simply cannot bid high enough and fast enough in those last few seconds to get their bid recognized... if they don't go higher than my bid... they can do whatever they like and it simply won't make the slightest difference...because they are not competing with me... they are competing with the last bid that was accepted...and since I have already beaten THAT bid... nothing else matters in the end unless they top my highest bid. I never use any Windows applications.... Strictly Linux...and at the moment...Debian 8 "Jessie" suits my needs perfectly.

Besides that, most of those applications require the user to open up a matching browser to watch the time stamp clock and its almost as complicated as Kabuki Theater to work both browsers fast enough for it to matter. All I know is... I generally win and get the items I go after for a fraction of my last huge and final offer and if a bidding war ensues in the last minute I just hold off and wait until I find a better deal at a later time. I have used this technique successfully nearly 1,200 times... and even Dr. Carl Sagan or Oxford Prof. Nick Bostrom would agree that this is high enough of a statistical sample to be a significant indicator of my actual success.


"The Mudd Elephant... Wading through The Sea Shore... Leaves NO TRACKS..."
Frank Zappa... "The Mothers of Invention"

 

[HARDTRAILZ]

Used to snipe all the time, but now I only use buy it now on ebay.

 

[Blckshdw]

Used to snipe all the time, but now I only use buy it now on ebay.

This. Usually the only time I even bother with auctions, is if it's going to be ending within 24 hours, the starting bid is stupid low, and there's no immediate need for it. If that's the case then I'll snipe.

I tend to look for the lowest Buy It Now price from another ad, and set my max bid at that. If I lose the auction due to a snipe fest, then I'll just buy it now and be done with it.

 

[coolasice]

Always used online snipe tools, set the time before auction end you want to snipe and you bid amount and let it do all the work. Won some lost some. Myibidder.com is my usual go to.

 

[SnowBlazer]

Back 5 or so years ago, I used to do this with PS2 games. I've tried sniping for some trailblazer parts and nine times out of ten, the seller out smarts everyone by putting a reserve on the item. I've actually had it happen to me multiple times where I would win an item, and the sale would be cancelled due to a reserve.

 

[coolasice]

Back 5 or so years ago, I used to do this with PS2 games. I've tried sniping for some trailblazer parts and nine times out of ten, the seller out smarts everyone by putting a reserve on the item. I've actually had it happen to me multiple times where I would win an item, and the sale would be cancelled due to a reserve.

The listing tells you if there is a reserve or not...

 

[mrrsm]

The weirdest thing I ever Lurked on was an actual Civil Defense Cold War Geiger Counter after I found out on WIKI that Bananas are all Radioactive due to the high Potassium and Phosphorus content in them. It seems that the AEC (Atomic Energy Commission) actually had a scaled and quantified amount of radiation exposure that a person can be get after eating Bananas... and they call it a BED or "Banana Equivalent Dose". So I thought...what the heck... maybe somebody has one of these things out there and I poked around and found just the right one... because many of them being offered only measure extremely high doses of lethal Gamma Radiation and will not even register Beta or even Alpha particles. But I got lucky and did my usual 3X in the last few seconds of the offer and won it for about $40.00.

Now I really did not expect a device that was designed for the End of the World would still be working after sitting on a shelf in some Godforsaken Fallout Shelter for well over 50 Years... but by God... I cleaned up the contact terminals and plunked in 8 Big D-Cell Batteries and fired it up... hell it even came with its own Uranium Oxide Test Pellets and they were VERY much still radioactive, what with a half-life of 500,000 years... and I knew this was so because it was making the needle of the register move rapidly up and down the Roentgen Scale Meter. Later on I was sampling the air and ground outside after the Fukijima Meltdown. So... here are the images and the test video I shot while testing out if that urban myth was real or not:

http://s557.photobucket.com/user/60dgrzbelow0/library/AGEIGERCOUNTERCDV700?sort=3&page=1

 

[dmanns67]

I don't recall ever bidding on anything on EBay. Like others, I always do the buy it now. Plus you don't have to worry about a reserve on an item.

 

[Mooseman]

I used to manually snipe all the time and then went to Myibidder.com for automatic sniping. But nowadays, the majority of eBay listings are BIN.

I used to use weird bids like $213.22. I had won several just by those 22 cents. I used either 13 for my older son's birthday and 22 for my younger son's.

 

[Reprise]

I agree - most of what I'm looking for has a BIN attached to it these days. My last score (if you can call it that) was a couple of weeks ago - I was looking for a replacement front bumper cover for the Voy, and found a site selling a CAPA-certified one for what looked like a decent price - but I thought the shipping was a bit much. Hopped over to the Bay, and found the very same item, from the same company - for $10 cheaper for the item, and flat-rate shipping (also about $10 cheaper). And it had 0 bids on it, with about 3 days to go.

Now, generally, I'd wait and try and snipe the item (manually), but since this had no bids (there was a minimum bid, at the price I mention above), figured I'd put one in - maybe I'd sneak under the radar.

I guess no one's looking for Envoy body parts these days - because I won the item.

My wife was really good at manual sniping - I'd have her go get stuff for me all the time - and 90% of the time or better, she'd win the item. Just one little thing of many things I miss about her.

 

[mrrsm]

There is another weird way to beat the odds of the win that has to do with an astonishing number of Sellers who don't take the time to proof read their postings and in more cases than you might think... between the misspelling and the misnaming conventions that people use without actually knowing the proper names for things that will include them for discovery, there mishaps provide us with another exploit to investigate and find what you want.

For example... I was searching high and low for a decent set tail lights for both of my 4th Gen Camaros...and because they are as Scarce as Square Hens' Eggs, I could only find the junk ones out there. Anyway... I was so frustrated that I decided to try searching with a whole range of "improper" definitions...and low and behold...when I used the word "CAMERO"...up popped a set of TLS that included the entire tail light electrical harness for a Camaro SS...!

So that might be another avenue to find the things we want and to sort of "Get to heaven before the Devil Knows Your Dead...". All you need to do is get creative in figuring out all the variations of these bad spellings for the particular vehicle and the things you are searching for and just try them out.