September 10, 2006 on 2:36 pm | In Madness | No Comments

I’ve been meaning to write something about this for a while and as I’m about to put a pretty large number of things on ebay due to the mega clear-out of cupboards this weekend, I thought now was the time!

Ebay can be fantastic, but also very frustrating. Probably the most annoying thing that can happen is to lose an auction right at the last minute to a ‘sniper’ who bids a penny more than you in the last ten seconds. There are a few ways to try avoid this – reloading the page frantically, employing sniping software or a web service yourself. But the best way of beating the snipers is with psychology!

The important thing to remember about ebay is that really it is not an auction in the traditional sense. It’s not a market place, and there is no haggling. Selecting the appropriate bid price is vital, not to ensure that you aren’t out-bid, but to ensure your own happiness.

Here’s the recommendation, and I’ll explain why afterwards: always bid your geniune maximum price. Before you confirm the bid, think how you would feel if someone bid a penny more in the last minute? Would that really annoy you? If it would, then you probably haven’t really put your maximum bid down, you’ve put down what you would optimisitcally like to pay for it. Your geniune maximum price is the cut off point where you would happily be outbid.

The advantage of bidding your maximum is twofold; firstly, if you are outbid, you shouldn’t mind so much – it is geniunely more than you would have paid. Secondly, you have made the other bidder pay more than you wanted to. I think the real annoyance in losing an auction is when it goes for a price that you would have paid if only the page had refreshed faster / you weren’t away from your desk / the computer hadn’t crashed / etc.

Bidding correctly means you should only ever have to bid once, so no frantic page reloading in the last minute – you’ve either won the item, or someone else wanted to pay more for it. Really, it is a simple as that. The hard part is knowing exactly how much the maximum you want to pay for something is. We’re just not used to thinking about pricing in this way, usually you try to find the lowest price possible, not the highest! But the key thing here is that if you bid in this way, eBay’s software works for you, not against you – you will only pay slightly more than the next highest bidder. The maximum price you bid probably isn’t what you’re going to pay.

Another handy thing with psychologically correct bidding is that you can – and should – do it as early as possible. Remember that if two people bid the same, ebay will award the item to the earlier bidder. So it does pay to get in there early. Personally I always forget to do things I put off until later, so this is also just more convenient to bid on something when you see it.

With that said, there is one final tip to make your bids more likely to win: never bid a round number – it is too easy for someone to bid a few pence more in a last minute snipe. Instead choose a random number for the pennies, to confuse snipers.

But really the main tip is to spend time thinking about how you would feel if you lost the auction, and set your bid price accordingly. My ebaying has been much happier since I worked that out!