Rare Book Monthly
Articles - December - 2002 Issue
The Means of Book Trading That Dares Not Speak Its Name: eBay
OTHER SPECIALIZED OR FAVORITE EBAY BIDDING TECHNIQUES
Barlow: “My current eBay bidding technique is that I put material I’m interested in ‘on watch’ so that I can track it but avoid being spied on. Then I use an offline sniping service called Easy Snipe to put in a bid within the last 15 seconds of a sale. I used eBay’s proxy bids a lot before I got sniping software. It’s essentially the same principle.”
Barlow: “Because Bookfinder does largely the same thing. I know that I sometimes check comparative prices on Bookfinder and on eBay and will buy the better deal of the two.”
Dealer Y: “As I organically grow and my interests change, I always see pockets of market inefficiency and I go with them. That’s my primary bidding strategy.”
Dealer Y: “I consider the cultural context in which I’m trying to buy a book or an object. With eBay it is important to trade in material that ties into cultural events; sellers can capitalize by putting up topical material. One phenomenon about eBay is that it responds to trends within the already charged environment of the auction. Though it is not a physical auction, it still captures some auction psychology – people still spend more money on eBay, as they do at “regular” auctions than they would in a shop or other more controlled circumstances, with the ‘competition’ element of the auction driving prices up.
I try and use this to my advantage. For instance, to give you a concrete example: during the Titanic craze, just after the movie came out, I had a large run of people at my shop looking for books on the Titanic especially one book called The Sinking of the Titanic in first edition. Normally this book goes for say $85. After the movie came out, it traded on eBay for at least $150. Once the movie won all those Oscars, the same book traded for four times the original price – or $410-$412 – on eBay. And of course once I bought these books on eBay I could sell them to my customers for a lot more.”
Dealer Y: “Another thing that I often do is lurk on or just watch an item and when I’m just about to make a bid, I check out the handle or eBay name of who’s bidding against me and I click on their bidding history. You do this by going first to Feedback, then to Buying History which will show you their last few weeks or so of buying and the actual items they’ve bought. There is no way to block this as far as I know. Once you’re in their Buying History sometimes you can figure out who they are – if your bidding circle is small and specialized enough – and in any case you can see what kind of a bidder they are: deep-pocketed, cautious, low-end, etc. That way you can strategize and outbid them once you’ve figured out their patterns, what they will or won’t do next. For instance if they’re an impulsive bidder with mid-to-deep pockets, I might choose not to sprinkle the $1000 I had intended to spend over 5 lesser items but rather I might save it and put into a last minute blowing-them-out-of the-water bid for one major item.”
Dealer Y: “On the other hand, sometimes with an item I know my maximum from the start and nothing is going to shake me and I just bid at my maximum right out front, first thing, and see what comes of it. This is probably more true for material that I care less about in terms of whether I walk home with it. If I really care, I’ll use the techniques described above. When I bid at my maximum from the start I use eBay’s proxy bidding service but now that I know about bid sniping software/technology I imagine I’ll convert to that.”
