Ebay weirdness, dont understand this

Wademeister63 · #1 12-08-2006, 06:17 AM

Ric

Check this auction out and tell me what happened if you can.
I had asked the seller a question about a day and a half or two days before the end of this auction but had no reply so I wasn't going to bid. I just watched it and happened to check on it in the last few minutes or even seconds of the auction. Looks like somehow three different bidders retracted their bids right before the auction ended?! I looked at the feedback for the seller and all three bidders but everything looks legitimate to me.
Anyone know how this auction got messed up at the end or why anyone would go to such trouble to not sell that bass?

bongomania · #2 12-08-2006, 06:29 AM

That IS weird. The only scenario I can imagine at the moment is if the seller discovered some serious flaw in the bass, or damaged it, and emailed the bidders to inform them of the new problem, and they all decided to withdraw. Kooky though.

davidmurphy · #3 12-08-2006, 06:18 PM

Is it possible he created false accounts & put the bids in himself to try to generate a bit of interest?
Probably unlikely but I can't think of anything else.

Unless 1 person retracted for some reason & the other 2 got freaked?

beyondhairy · #4 12-08-2006, 06:46 PM

how do u retract bids?!

Wademeister63 · #5 12-08-2006, 10:41 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by davidmurphy

Is it possible he created false accounts & put the bids in himself to try to generate a bit of interest?
Probably unlikely but I can't think of anything else.

Unless 1 person retracted for some reason & the other 2 got freaked?

Yeah I thought that but there are three bidders all with over 100 feedbacks. Two of them have 100% positive feedback and one of them is 99%. The feedback for each of the three bidders involved looks reasonable to me since there are a bunch of different people leaving the feedback and it seems they each deal with their own specialty for the most part, which seems to be music related in all three cases. The bidders look solid to me. The bidder that would have won the auction had won a very similar Ric on November 1, and that was his most recent feedback. The really weird thing that has me puzzled is that the three seemingly unrelated bidders all canceled their bids for the same reason (wrong bid), and all three were canceled within 13 seconds of each other. It's all just very very fishy. I don't suppose I would care except for the fact that I was very close to bidding on that bass and now I wonder where I would have ended up in that mess. It was up for $711 for a long while and I considered bidding $725 but I figured the initial bid would have been higher than that anyway so I didn't bother. Any ideas?

Skel · #6 12-08-2006, 10:51 PM

I can't recall if one can distinguish between a retracted bid (by a bidder) and a cancelled bid (by the seller). If not, the seller may have changed his/her mind about selling and cancelled the bids and didn't know how to end the auction early instead. Otherwise, I wonder if these bidders got cold feet because the seller hadn't responded to them either. Maybe they each had a policy that if they didn't hear back before the auction ended, they were pulling out.

mimaz · #7 12-08-2006, 10:53 PM

Since they are all cancelled at about the same time, its my guess that they were actually cancelled by the seller. Probably wanted/needed to end the auction early, (maybe a local sale), and didn't really put in the correct explanation.

Wademeister63 · #8 12-09-2006, 08:19 PM

Relisted..

Well how about that. Looks like the seller couldn't figure it out either by what he said in the new listing. Too bad I don't want it anymore!