How To Buy Things For Less By Playing ‘The eBay Game’
My younger daughter’s computer bit the dust this week, and so Friday I bought her a new one on eBay.
My winning bid: $20.50
It’s not the absolute best computer in the world but it’s perfectly good for a young teen who’s not into gaming, and it’s better than the one that just died. A Pentium 4 running at 1.6 GHz will work fine syncing with her iPod, doing homework, and playing YouTube videos. I’d found a deal locally on the exact same computer, refurbished, for $200. But on eBay — even after shipping — I paid less than $60.
Inexpensive eBay shopping is a lot like playing a game. There are hundreds of different ways to do it, but this is the way I’ve settled on. It combines the best results with the most fun.
First of all, you need to find items you’re interested in where the auction ends outside of peak bidding times. My favorite time is before 8 AM on a weekday, while a good chunk of the continent is more preoccupied with getting to work on time than bidding against you.
I find an item I want, I decide how much I’m willing to pay for it (including shipping) and I bid accordingly. But I don’t bid up front, I wait until the last second.
Some people call this “sniping” a bid and they will hate you for it. I can live with that. Especially if I end up getting a good deal.
I bring up the same auction in two separate windows. In one, I place my bid amount … bidding the highest amount I’m willing to go … but I haven’t clicked the button to make the bid final. The button that commits you to the bid.
In the other window I view the item during the last few minutes of the auction, clicking refresh to watch the time left and how the bidding is going. Sometimes there is a lot of activity right at the very end of the bid which will put it completely out of your price range.
So, the clock ticks down, and there’s maybe 15 seconds left until the auction is over. In the case of this computer, the highest bid is still a very low $18.50. I’ve set my bid amount to $45 in the other window, and when it reaches the 15 second mark I pop over to that other window and click the button to actually place my bid. My bid pops up in the last several seconds of the auction, not giving anyone enough time to raise their bids against it.
Someone else bid a maximum of $20.00. Since my maximum bid was $45, I easily beat that person’s $20 — raising the incremental bid to $20.50 in my favor.
So, I won.
If I had bid my $45 even minutes in advance, it would have given others time to bid against me and keep raising their bid until theirs went higher than mine. Before I started bidding this way, I always seemed to lose an auction by pennies. Why? Because someone else was sniping against me.
Now, there is always a chance that — using this auction as an example — someone else had already bid an amount higher than mine. So the guy who originally bid $18.50, say his highest bid amount was $100, then my bid would have gone in at the last minute but still lost, and he would have won the auction at $45.50.
If that happens, laugh and shrug it off, and go to the next item. If there’s anything you can count on with eBay, there is always the next item. And it is most definitely a game.
Do you have a favorite method in your own eBay madness?
UPDATE: The computer arrived in perfect condition, I set it up, loaded the operating system and software, and then copied over all the information I managed to save from her old dying computer. It runs fast, and she’s very happy with it. I’m now thinking about buying one for myself!
How it starts out with me, I get blind spots. Like early today I was writing a beer review and was having problems seeing what I had just typed. It gave me a sudden sinking feeling, and I wondered, Is this a migraine coming on?
