What is it with Ebay?

A perfectly good service on the whole, and it has certainly replaced the hire shops for musicians, you buy it in one week for the job, then put it back on the next week, even saving the sales info with permission.

Simple, but..

..I had been trying to buy a spare amp and speaker set up for the studio for ages, for sound comparison, and continually ended up with the same seller(presumably a shop), who has a great deal of second hand top notch equipment.
On no less than eight occasions I have been pipped at the post in the last five minutes on a bid, by the sum of

I've been getting this kind of thing happening to me a lot lately on eBay as well. In my case its computer hardware and I am bidding right up till the final minute and yes, get "outbid" by a pound or two only to find the same seller offering an identical part within days at the same starting price. I am certain such sellers are simply mucking around and wasting everybody's time but one cannot but wonder why on earth they bother. It is most annoying!

I did suspect a computer programme doing it, as a friend of mine has a ecord shop and uses a programme up until the last five minutes to do the bidding, however, it goes against this in many cases, which can be tested by the response time to "ask the seller a question".
If the reply is within a minute(as mine was), I would say avoid, they really are sitting there clicking pointlessly away it would seem.

Maybe they should get a X-Box instead..

I am a user of eBay, however the days of it being a secret zone of hidden bargains are over I am afraid. HOWEVER there are some excellent items to be had still, which invites me to check regularly.

A tip was given to me that has worked very well, and that is stop thinking of it as a place for cheap goods. Place a bid that fairly reflects what you would pay for the item in a shop (minus any guarantee) and place that bid not at the last moment (i.e. treat it like a real auction).

I bid 60 Euros on a lens I wanted from Germany last week, and despite the last second bidding programs having a go, I still won it for less than my maximum. I did not worry about sitting by the computer at the last moments either - I had already placed my maximum bid.

I am winning far more items than I used to as well with this technique.

RT

Well yes there is that.
I had forgotten that I bought a grandfather clock "place bid or buy it now for

The clock which my Grandfather owned was a complete nightmare. For starters, although this was probably more his fault than the clocks, it was too tall to fit in the gap on the shelf it was intended for so it had to sit on the floor for ninety years.

Other than that it served him well and would have been handed down to myself only it mysteriously stopped working when he died. It was as if it were counting his "life seconds".

Spooky.

Ah ! The grandfather clock stopping when.... theory.

There is actually a very logical reason for this.

Usually, the clocks have so many little foybles that only the owner can actually keep them going,I had one in which the original cat gut had to keep being tied and re-wound etc, along with certain cogs that needed WD40 on them, and some which would not work if they touched it.
I would bet that, that clock of mine has never worked since I last saw it.