First Bad EBAY experience and also recommendation.

[gbadge]

Firstly I have no beef with EBAY because I have bought loads of stuff recently, grips, batteries, flash brackets and lens etc but have just been stung so I thought I'd warn the others out there.

I bid for a Rio Carbon MP3 player which has a seagate 5gb CF card which of course would fall out of the RIO and into my 5d as quick as a flash. Anyway the bidder turned out to have a load of EBAY user ID's and shill bid on the item then retracted the bids forcing my bid up to it's maximum. I therefore ended up paying well over the odds due to this.

I haven't received the item and when I checked on EBAY it seems that this user and all the other ID;s used for bidding have closed their accounts.

Luckily I only lost £25.00 ($40) but it's the principle, it could have been a lens or something.

Just thought I'd share this with you, Watch Out, I thought I was a shrewd buyer but there's always someone willing to shaft you.

[gbadge]

Further to my last I can really recommend the digipad cleaning kit and eclipse fluid. Brilliant. I got this from EBAy so not all bad.

[blu82]

Genuine sellers can sometimes be as bad.
Canon Outlet froze 3100 pounds in my account then told me the item was out of stock.
I asked them how I could win a bid (1DSMkII) on an item that didn't exist. Their nonsense response prompted me to call in at my local police station to report fraud. The camera arrived the next morning. How could it if there was no stock? They are either incompetent or dishonest.

[Bruce Hamilton]

Anyway the bidder turned out to have a load of EBAY user ID's and shill bid on the item then retracted the bids forcing my bid up to it's maximum.

You need to learn the art of eBay sniping. :p

[BillsBayou]

Bruce has it right. I used to hang out at the eBay discussion groups and would point out the many fine points of sniping at eBay.

If you see something you like and there are no bids, go ahead and bid the minimum. Sellers are generally reluctant to pull an auction if there is at least one bid on the item. Your interest in the item will encourage the seller to keep the item on line until the very end.

Near the end of the auction, place your bid with less than one minute left. You'll need to view the auction in two separate windows to do this. One window is the auction page, the other is your bid ready to commit. Keep an eye on how your computer's clock relates to the clock at eBay. The best snipers like to ride the clock to under ten seconds. My personal best at sniping is with one second left to go.

Shill bidders do not want to win. They're just there to drive up the price. If they don't know you're about to snipe, they won't have any time to react to your last second bid. If they try to shill your token bid, they'll find out that you only bid the minimum. If they run up the bid on a real competing bidder, you'd have to bid against that guy anyway.

Bidding wars are for losers. People get emotional when bidding and you soon see them bidding more for the item than they could get it at their local retailer. Snipers are cool bidders by nature. No emotion. They bid once and if they win, good. If they lose, then they know they've bid the absolute maximum they were willing to pay anyway.