Catch-22 and a perfect eBay Gotcha

[RogerS]

PayPal provides the option for two-stage verification of any purchase using them by sending a 6-digit number as a text to your mobile phone. An extra level of security (yeah, yeah..I know that mobiles can get scammed etc but that's not the point here).

But if you link your eBay account to your PayPal account then that extra level of security goes out of the window. eBay have never bothered/are unable to/don't care to/all three (delete as appropriate) to do this.

So why would you want to link the two?

Because, as I found out tonight, if you set up a snipe for an item and the buyer has set the Buyer Requirements to have a PayPal account then unless you have linked your PayPal account with your eBay account then your bid is rejected.

Good one, eh?

I guess the way around it is to temporarily link the accounts, wait for the auction to end, then remember to go and unlink them but a bit of a faff.

 

[Wizard9999]

What is a snipe?

 

[Rob]

sniping is when you either manually or have software do it for you, bid in the very closing seconds of an auction. Programs like goofbid can time their snipes less than a second before the auction ends, thus avoiding a competitive counter bid at the last minute.

 

[RogerS]

Yup..Rob's explained it perfectly. The advantage of sniping is that you don't get caught up in a bidding war and get carried away by offering a price higher than you would perhaps normally pay. If you snipe, you decide the maximum that you'd like to bid and tell the sniping program that figure. I use AuctionSniper.

I know you can put in a maximum bid into eBay itself but would you trust eBay not to up the bidding artificially? After all, they get paid on the Final Bid price and so it is in their interest for the Final Bid to be as high as possible. That's why eBay hate sniping programs.

 

[Wizard9999]

Yup..Rob's explained it perfectly. The advantage of sniping is that you don't get caught up in a bidding war and get carried away by offering a price higher than you would perhaps normally pay. If you snipe, you decide the maximum that you'd like to bid and tell the sniping program that figure. I use AuctionSniper.

Ah ok, that is what I do manually anyway, just didn't know it had a name or that there were program's to do it for you. Like you say, I do it to ensure I don't have time to make another bid if I am outbid at the last second. Mind you, with the our poor internet connection I rarely dare to leave it later than 10 seconds from the end.

I know you can put in a maximum bid into eBay itself but would you trust eBay not to up the bidding artificially? After all, they get paid on the Final Bid price and so it is in their interest for the Final Bid to be as high as possible. That's why eBay hate sniping programs.

I don't think I would have thought about eBay doing that, simply because if it became public it could destroy them, but Iam sure there are plenty of sellers who do it.

Terry.