I’m sorry if others have asked about this but I couldn’t find it.  Recently I placed a bid on an item I wanted to win, but it isn’t somethinf rare or hard to find.  I just bid a FMV price at BIN, and hoped to save a few bucks.

The auction was ending in about 10 hours so I just made my bid and walked away last night.

I awoke this morning and found that I had won for my max bid.  This wouldn’t be a big deal but eBay emailed me and let me know that someone outbid me and then retracted their bid.

So, evidence IMHO is pretty clear that a shill bidder bumped me up to my max bid.  Though it’s a fair price, I disagree with this behavior and I’d rather walk away.  The whole purchase is just $18 though, and I’d rather not have to deal with negative feedback.  Does eBay have a way to research this and report it?  The auction ended this morning so I think it’s a but obvious of what happened.

Shouldn't the bid just revert back to your original bid after the retraction? Seems super shady although for $18 it's probably not worth the effort.

So I look at the policy below and see you can retract under 12 hours if your bid was less than an hour old. Is it possible someone was trying to get above you, found the high bid then changed their mind as well?
One could for sure shill bid and bid things up as well. If you placed your max bid and won and feel it isn't fair and claiming scamming that just comes with the territory of Ebay unfortunately. 


When you can retract a bid

 

You can retract a bid if:

• The seller significantly changed the description of the item
• You accidentally bid the wrong amount. For example, you meant to bid $20, not $200. In this case, enter the price you intended to bid as soon as you've retracted the incorrect bid
• You can't reach the seller. For example, you sent the seller an email and it comes back undeliverable, or you tried calling the seller and the phone number doesn't work

As well as the above, timing is also important when retracting a bid:

• If there are 12 hours or more left before the listing ends, all of your bids can be retracted
• If the listing is ending in less than 12 hours, you can retract your most recent bid if it's been less than an hour since you placed it

Any other bids can't be retracted, but you can contact the seller to see if they'll agree to cancel a bid for you.

 

You would think eBay would have something in place to prevent bids from being retracted and triggering your bid to stay at max. Then again, it is eBay.

Probably jack, shit.

You could call eBay and explain the situation and maybe have them cancel the auction.

Worst case just don't pay. Sellers can't leave negative feedback.

Or if you are ok with price, finish the purchase and leave a neg for the seller.

New day on a job guys, I'll post an update when I get a moment. Anyway, I don't mind the price. What I mind is the cheating. I'll post a link to the auction below. I've only looked at it on my phone, so I've not inspected the bids on a laptop yet. Not sure how to do that in the eBay app.

Sellers Can leave feedback, but just on your buyers feedback. I have also ran into this and have often wondered if the seller himself has another account, or has someone else do this for them to inflate the bid price. Now for $18 prob not but for more expensive items, i could see this being used to maximise profits.

If a bid is retracted, then your bid will decrease. However, the OP’s scenario could happen if the other party bid and found out your max and then retracted in order to bid at your max.

 

Doesn't sound like it is worth the hassle. If anything say something to him to shame him.

While it's possible this was cheating / shill bidding, it's also possible that it was an unrelated party. Particularly for such a small item. Maybe someone bid on it and changed their mind or whatever, who knows.

If it was intentional and by the seller, yeah that's really crappy and he should face some consequences, negative feedback, etc. But, I would also make sure I knew that's what happened before accusing someone of cheating and/or giving negative feedback.

Here's the link to the auction. They turned on the privacy option so all you see is that the auction was bumped up $1.00 at a time. I think the bidding was at $10 when I bid, and my bid made it something like $11.00. I was a bit wrong about the timing, but you can see that actually about 13 hours before it ended, someone bumped up the price $1.00 at a time and then retracted their last bid.

I can't prove this is shill bidding, but who would bump it up that way, only to retract their bids within an hour? Seems fishy.

No, I wouldn't throw out negative feedback on something that's circumstancial. However, as I mentioned just now, they used the "keep bidders private" option and then within 1 hour of the 12 hour limit, I was bumped up and they tracted their final bid.

I'd like to cancel the order, list the reason why and allow eBay to look into this.  I don't think that when the seller uses private auctions I can look to see if the former bidder has frequently bid on this sellers auctions.  You can't see names, but eBay offers those stats with a buyer hash.  Here's the auction:

https://www.ebay.com/bfl/viewbids/323884868473?item=32388486...

Yeah, it's just Star Fox for the 3DS.  I've been wanting to play this game for a while and my N64 is currently packed away.  $18 for the experience isn't bad, but I was hoping to save a few bucks below GVN/typical BIN values.
 

Hmmm.....yeah, that does look pretty shady.  I understand not wanting to support that.  

Whatever happens, good luck to ya!

Bid retractions happe sometimes, but I've only had my maxed out bid win like 2-3 times in 15+ years. Having both is too much of a coincidence.

It could have been a salty third party completely unrelated to the seller.

I thought I may have had something similar happen to me a few weeks ago (I got outbid but then had a "second chance offer" within 5 minutes; seller claimed winning buyer was from Poland). It was plausible enough, plus it was still a great deal on a hard to find lot of stuff.

Seems fishy for sure, I'd be annoyed and would seriously consider cancelling the purchase, in any case I wouldn't leave negative as there's no way to tell the seller was involved on this.

Id recommend you use a sniper like myibidder.com next time, this situation would've been avoided if your bid were to be placed seconds before the auction ends.

If it was the same person bumping it by a $1 each time (and it looks like it, since it was done just seconds apart), the way I used to understand how this worked was eBay was supposed to cancel ALL their beds, not just the final one, dropping you back to whatever you were at before they had bumped it up at all. This may have changed, but I'd say it's worth a call to eBay to relay your suspicions, as there's zero reason to bump it up $5 incrementally then backtrack over $1 unless you're specifically trying to max someone out. The fact that the auction hides all bidder information just makes it even fishier, as I want to say on all "private" auctions I can recall participating in, I can at least see the random nonsense bidder names that eBay uses to shield non-sellers from figuring out who bidders and winners are.

I had a similar thing where my max bid was just barely passed, and then I got a second chance offer. Turned em down cuz it seemed scummy and wasn't a particularly rare item, and my bid was fmv.

Well, I'm 90% sure that this is a bad seller considering the circumstantial evidence ...but I just paid for it. The seller has positive feedback. So long as the game is legit, I'll just let it be. If this was more money, I'd definitely contact eBay and if this guy is cheating bidders, he needs to be caught. But, it was $18 shipped. I'm just going to let it pass. :/

Ebay seller is low numbers and 100% feedback. Doesn't seem like something worth going to all that trouble to squeeze a few bucks out of a sub $20 item...............I think you are paranoid and nobody is out to get you. ;-) Unless............are they? :-)

This exact thing happened to me earlier this year. I barely lost out on an auction and then got a second chance offer in the middle of the night. I let it go though since it was a homebrew that seldom pops up (and which several people recently have been clamoring for a copy of) and I was willing to pay my max bid in the first place even if my instinct told me I was being squeezed.
 

This. Unless you can conclusively prove they were shill bidding.

 

I've won $xxx.xx not round number snipes by a few cents by cooincidence. I'd personally accept a max bid of $15.00 on the dot, the nearest round number below market value, as pure cooincidence even if the retracted bid makes it sketchier. It's a good reason to add like $1.12 to your bids because of all the lazy people who just type in round numbers.

Ebay does have some kind of simple shill bidding tracking if someone's using an alternate or friend's account to bid things up (based on address, IP, or bid history?) and they send out "Hey, stop that" emails but don't reverse the sales. And really they don't have incentive to, it would just be more support cost for them and lower sales numbers.

Who can tell? I mostly quit going after auctions and just try to get low BINs. eBay is a weird place sometimes.
I had a guy send a best offer and when I accepted, they didn't pay for two days. I sent a reminder to pay and they told me they were broke and didn't have the money! Why send an offer then?