The View From Under The Desk: Auction Rant

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11 August 2011

Auction Rant

The purpose of an auction is to sell your item. That is all.

There's a psychological component to auctions where there's competition in the bidding that can get more for the item than its market value.

On online auction places like ebay or gunbroker it is very common to have a reserve price. Basically this is the minimum price the seller is willing to take.

An irritation that's surfaced for me lately is sellers who set a relatively high reserve price against an extremely token start price. So if you make a token bid, it doesn't meet reserve and you have to keep rebidding until you cross the threshold price.

Wasting my time.

Time and time again, my $5 bid on your started at 1¢ but didn't meet reserve is the ONLY bid that item gets. You relist and I bid $5 you don't make reserve... I can keep not spending $5 forever, dude. Why don't you set your start price at the min price and save everyone some time?