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thoughts on the' dangers 'of extended bidding at auctions

Be interested to hear other peoples thoughts. 

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I know I got trapped into a bidding war a decade ago and spent more than twice my intended max. I wanted to spend $700 but it turned out I got caught in a bidding war and ended up spending $1800 on a Humphrey Bogart personalized signed album page. Needless to say when I went to sell it as I was refocusing my collection I got $700 for it. 

It feels like moving the goalposts in additional time, doesn’t it?

Personally, I’m a big fan of sniping items in the final 20 seconds of an auction, not allowing any potential competitors time to adjust their maximum bids.  Likewise, not allowing myself time either.  It doesn’t always work out, but at least it’s fair to all involved.  We’ve set our respective stalls out and we all have to live with the consequences of our decisions.


The real beneficiaries of extended bidding are the seller and the auction house, maximising their return and commission respectively.  The danger for bidders is in entering a last minute bidding war where the heart rules the head.  I can only recall a couple of occasions where extended bidding came into play for me.  Both times it was triggered by my own late bids.  Both times, no one else came in to challenge me and I just had to wait out the extended period.

indeed.  The worst is the 2 min extended bidding period from certain auction houses because common sense goes completely out of the window if you are, as I was the underbidder and a red mist descends .............

There’s an auction house in Shrewsbury where the extended bidding period is ten minutes.  That’s a long wait.

On the flipside, if I want something badly enough, and feel like the chance won’t come again, I can be guilty of placing a stupidly high maximum bid in order to ensure the item comes to me.  I did this just last week.  Mercifully, the bidding didn’t reach anywhere near the maximum I’d entered.

Personally, I bid my maximum immediately and don't look back. If I get it, great, if not, too bad. I am not going to participate in a bidding frenzy.

Anyone here subscribe to eMovie Poster dot com? I received a long rambling email recently from there which - reading between the lines - implied that accusations had been made about phantom or shill bidding on the site - particularly in respect of maximum bids. The gist of this message was that "other" online auctions do run up their customers' maximum bids but their hands are clean because they use a third party hosting site - AuctionAnything dot com - and so do not even "see" the bids. It was a very strange message altogether, quite out of the blue.

Depends what it is.  I recently won an item of vintage concert memorabilia from an iconic gig by a major star.  The word rare doesn’t even cover it.  This is the first time this particular item has ever come to market in 54 years.  It is quite possibly unique.  There are no second chances with something like that.  There was no way it was ever coming to anyone else but me.

Findbooks -

I used to do some bidding with eMoviePoster (when I was more interested in lobby cards, half-sheets, etc..).  I go back to the days when they were still based on eBay before they set up their own site (which has done well).

They've been beating that drum about no shill bidding and no hidden reserves since they left eBay.  I do indeed believe them on their claims about not playing the games that some of the other auction houses do.  

The idea of a specific ending time for an auction is largely a creation of the internet. Traditional in-person auctions have always ended when the bidding ends.  

The auctioneers and consignors always hope for a bidding war.  ;)

The world is changed.  You can’t put technological advancement back in the box.

You’d struggle to find an auction house that wants to go back to how things were 25-30 years ago.  Maybe it’s different if they’re selling livestock, or something like that, but not for the kinds of things we collect.  Pretty much everyone has embraced the worldwide market, and technology is a crucial part of making that system work.

I think that technology is finally catching up to the real world auction format.  Timed endings were an early limitation for on-line auctions.  The auctions that get extended after the last bid represent the advancement of technology.

Timed endings benefit buyers, extended bidding benefits auction houses and sellers. That's the reality. 

From a programming perspective, the ability to extend an auction period is very easy.  Just one action triggering another.  It’s no different really than Ticketmaster giving you a set period to complete a transaction before the tickets in your basket are released back into the general pool; they’ve been doing that for many years now.  With the online auction thing, I think it’s more a matter of an old fashioned industry playing catch-up.

But I agree, the extended bidding period benefits the seller and the auction house, not the buyer.  I’m surprised eBay hasn’t adopted it yet.

Things kind of blend together over time for me.  But, am I mistaken in recollecting that eBay, in the early days, used to indeed have extended bidding (back when there were more actual auctions and not the use of fixed prices)?  I could be wrong on that.  

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