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About Me: cafe-dog ( 206Feedback score is 100 to 499) About Me

DOG'S ME PAGE

Howdy : )

 My name is Dog and I love eBay. I've been here ever since I was a puppy.

DOGS DICTIONARY OF EBAY TERMS:

 BIDDED:
bidded= done bid
rebidded= done bid again
outbidded= some dude bidded more
shill bidded= i didn't know it was my stuff


PROXY BIDDING:
Contrary to popular belief, this has nothing to do with epoxy or peroxide. Proxy is ebayonics for ‘proximately’ which means ‘about’ or ‘kinda like’. This means you are bidding about what you want to pay right now, but not how much you might want to pay later, although you really hope you aren’t gonna pay that much now, but you don’t know cause some other dude may have proxy bidded about what he wanted to pay and it might be real close to what you wanted to pay right now. If they did that and you did that, then you will find that what you got is what you get, except that you don’t really get it unless you change your mind and re-poxy some amount that is more than you bidded earlier and is about what you are willing to pay now that you’ve had a chance to reconsider what you bidded earlier. There really isn’t a problem unless one or more other peeps are thinking about like you are, and that is pretty scary.
Anyway, if you bidded more than the current bid or the starting bid, whichever is applicable, and more than the standard bid increments, and if no one else has already proxy bidded in the meantime, or if they have proxy bidded and you proxy bidded more than they did, , and if there is no reserve, then ebay will only accept that part of your bid that is needed to make you the current high bidder. Ebay takes the extra money you bidded and puts it in a little piggy bank and they leave it there until some other dude comes along and bids more than the current bid, but less than what you proxy bidded and then they shake the money out of the piggy bank and add it to the auction so you will still be the high bidder instead of the other dude. They will do that even if you don’t know its happening. You could be down at the Dairy Queen eating one of them foot longs with chili and cole slaw and still out bid the dude. Neat, huh? Well, if the new bidder puts in a proxy bid that is higher than your proxy bid, then he becomes the high bidder, and you get the money back that they had in the piggy bank.....maybe. If you get home from the Dairy Queen and proxy bid again and out proxy the other guy then they will keep that money and whatever new money you bidded providing you are the high bidder at the end of the auction. (They don’t actually keep it, but you know what I mean) You have to be careful though because even if you get outbidded, you could still end up winning the auction if the high bidder cancels his/her bid or if the seller thinks the high bidder has cooties or something and boots em off. It’s not actually real money in the piggy bank anyway.....not until you win.

RESERVE PRICE AUCTION
The reserve price is an invisible price a seller sets to prevent the auction from selling at a price less they will accept at the end of the auction, but more than the amount for which you are allowed to place a bid. The reserve price really isn’t invisible, you just can’t see it. No wait, OK, so maybe it is invisible, forget that.
Think of a reserve price auction like this: You are at a small county fair and little old Mrs. bixley has a booth selling pound cake for $1.00 a slice. She’s sitting way in the back of her booth in a rocking chair knitting toe socks, and there’s a mason jar on the table where you’re supposed to put your dollar. Her boy Orville, a 400 pound mute who just got home from the state asylum, is standing next to the jar with a claw hammer. Orville is the reserve. You could put $2.00 in the jar and that would be fine, or you could put $1.00 in the jar and that would be OK too, but if you put 50 cents in there, you ain’t ever getting any pound cake in this lifetime. Maybe that’s not a good example, forget that.
OK, lets say the seller, we’ll call him Melvin, which may or may not be his real name…it doesn’t matter….Anyway, Melvin wants to sell this widget, and widgets like this one usually sell for around a hundred bucks. Melvin paid 62 bucks for this thing at a yard sale in Pismo beach, but that doesn’t matter either…forget that. So Melvin thinks he’ll start it at 65 bucks and he’ll get his money back and make at least 3 bucks if it sells, and then he thinks, “well…..you know what?…maybe the auction would get more attention if it started at one dollar, and if more peeps see it then more will be attracted to it and maybe one of them will be drunk and” ….no wait….forget that. So Melvin figures it would be more fun for people to do a lot of bidding, so he puts in a RESERVE price of 65 bucks and he starts the auction at a dollar and 71 cents. He figures peeps will see the funny amount and say “what the”…..Melvin is a tricky dude.
Anyway, now peeps can go bid they little hearts out, but until someone bids 65 dollars or more, the bids don’t really count, because you gotta beat the reserve to be a winner when the auction ends. If you are the high bidder at 64 bucks when the auction ends, you don’t get diddly squat and Melvin doesn’t even have to send an email to tell you you’re a loser. If you see the auction with a nice widget starting at $1.71 and you get all excited cause you need one of those, and you bid $118.28 (cause you kinda tricky too), then the bid will go to 65.00 and stop, because that is where the reserve is set. The proxy bidding system will only let you bid (like right now, and not including the amount that is proxyfied) enough to become the high bidder. So if another dude comes by and bids $83.53 (lots of peeps are tricky), the bid will go to $83.53 plus the standard bid increment (I think about a dollar in this case) or $84.53. You will still be the high bidder and you will be covered until your proxy money runs out at $118.28 or until your ex-wife or girlfriend find out you have $118.28 then….never mind…forget that.
But the point is you could pound that little keyboard and bid all day long, but until you reach the reserve, you can’t be a winner. Now you know Melvin isn’t going to sell this widget for $1.71 because it says right there on the auction page “RESERVE NOT MET” . Now Melvin might say in the auction description that he has a reserve of 65 bucks, or he might say he has a “low” reserve, or he might just rattle on about how he has 14 cats or some other crap not relevant to the auction and not say diddly about the reserve. If you are curious about the reserve price you can email Melvin and ask him if he will reveal the reserve price. Melvin may or may not tell you. This may be the only secret Melvin has left and he may not want to give it up. This is his choice, and he doesn’t have to tell you if he doesn’t want to. If you ask him in the same email if he knows how to tell if your pet gerbil is a girl or a boy, then he may get agitated and confused and tell you the reserve price just to get you the hell out of his life. The best thing to do however is to just put in a proxy bid for the most you are willing to pay for this thing and still be happy about it. If that price doesn’t meet the reserve then you wouldn’t have been happy with the price you would have had to pay, if you had to pay it, and so you are happy in a peculiar sort of way.
So the bottom line is this. Some people use reserves because they don’t want to start the auction off too high so they will attract more attention, while at the same time they aren’t taking a chance on someone getting it too cheap. The seller has to do a lot of math before doing all this. You should give them a dollar just for all the math they do. They have to figure the difference between the fee for the reserve price, and the listing fee, which is based on the amount of the opening bid. They also have to figure out a bunch of other options and they have to figure that if they get it wrong and they want too much, then the item won’t sell and they have to pay the listing fees and the reserve fee anyway, plus they wasted a lot of time, plus they ticked you off because you wanted the widget and you didn’t want to pay that much. So don’t ever worry about a reserve price auction. Ignore the reserve…treat it just like any other auction. ……..Orville won’t hurt you, but you may have to look someplace else for that pound cake : ) br>

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