Ebay question: Why bid on an item with no intention of paying?

I’ve never bid on an item without the intention of paying. I guess it’s just the ’bad eggs’. The basic process is:

1) Seven days after the auction ends, sellers can file an unpaid item dispute.

2) eBay contacts the buyer. If the buyer doesn’t respond, then you can be eligible for a free relisting and they will receive an unpaid item strike.

More on: http://pages.ebay.com/help/tp/unpaid-item-process.html

Hope this helps.

Deliberate bad bids are done either to drive up the price, or to discover what the high bidder’s maximum bid is. A particularly nasty trick to to have a bogus account big real high and immediately retract the bid, only later to place another bid using a different account. The bogus high bid tells the scammer exactly how much he needs to bid to win the item (or at least beat the current high bidder). Then the scammer can come back and later and do one of two things:

1) bid $1 more than your maximum bid and win for the mininum amount possible.

2) bid $1 less than your maximum, guaranteeing that you pay as much as possible.

#1 is done by a competing bidder; #2 is done by the seller or a seller’s friend. Keep in mind that it’s easy to get and use multiple accounts if you only complete transactions with one main account.

As to your last question, I think 3 – 5 days is a reasonable amount of time to wait. And state in your auctions that “seller must make payment in 5 days.” to protect yourself from a buyer complaining.

Thanks a lot. Wow, that’s messed up. Next time I won’t accept bids from anyone with zero feedback. I wonder if I should re-list or directly contact the “2nd place” bidder. I know there’s a second chance feature but ebay takes a percentage. Do you know what it is?

Maybe the bad bidders are just jerks!

I think sometimes the sellers do the same thing. I bought something once using the graduated bid and someone bid above it pushing my bid to the high end. Then they withdrew there bid some how. I got the product I wanted but it seemed suspect. .

If one is simply browsing and just places bids all “willy-nilly” like and have no real intention on buying I just cant see the point….