Blitz (and related) bits on Ebay Australia

[Tony Wheeler]

Originally Posted by Hanno Spoelstra

I am not sure what your point is?

My point in all this is to defend sellers who withdraw from auction upon receiving an offer, in response to a few comments which were critical of the practice. I was pointing out the risk involved in allowing the auction to continue, owing to the unique bidding system employed on ebay. Namely as I said: "there's always the risk they would have fetched less, even if the phone caller had bid his offer." That's obviously NOT the case at a normal auction.

Note that I'm not being critical of ebay's bidding system - I'm merely pointing out the unique difficulty it presents for sellers when an offer is made. For the offer to be matched on ebay, he needs TWO bidders willing to pay that price.

The solution of course is to raise the reserve price, as Tony said, but in this particular case that wasn't possible, and even in the general case, such a strategy puts the sale in jeopardy, since there's no guarantee the offer will materialize as a bid.