I'd be very surprised if this winning bid was ever paid but it tempts me to put my rarer 'prototype' Military No 6 up for auction.
There must be something wrong with my glasses - I'm reading the final sale price as over £5300 Surely that '5' must be an extraneous typo
I've always presumed, when you see prices like that, that you have someone whose bidding style is to put on a massively high bid to make sure that they will always be the highest bidder and get the item they want but never expects to have to pay anything like the max bid they've put on. And this works well providing everyone else who is bidding in the auction is only bidding market prices. The problem comes when there is someone else in the same auction with the massive bidding style and they end up bidding against each other and the bid suddenly goes from £60 to £6,000. The highest roller then retracts their bid because they can't pay them and everyone is left annoyed. I've been offered an item because I was the 3rd highest bidder, several hundred pounds less that the two higher bidders who both retracted their bids citing "finances have changed". I thought you couldn't retract bids, but it seems that you can with impunity as I see this kind of thing more and more. I think it should be a LOT harder and costlier to retract bids as that's the only way this is going to stop.
I would consider that cheating. If I was the seller I would end up in a position where I could accept a fair price although I would still be paying auction fees based on the bid value or flagging the whole lot to ebay management and relisting the stove. There is a principle at stake here but it would depend on how far above the fair price that offer is. In this case a fairly rare stove so fair is 1000 maybe. I would want at least double that
I don't understand the logic /reason for such a price for this particular stove. Can you help me understand why? I would think 700-1000 euros for a rare stove in decent working order ,is reasonable! But 5000 pounds is obscene! Hell, where I live I can buy a heavy fuel burner 100 kw for 1200 euros.yes old,yes used but in great working order.good for another few years with no problems...
@Gabriel Lorin I think it's people "cheating" at eBay as @geeves says (I too consider it cheating). It works like this: you have an auction for somehing whose market price is around £50 and the starting price on the auction is £30. There are three people bidding for it. Bidder A, a normal eBay bidder, and bidders B and C who are "high rollers" - these are people who put on a massively high bid to make sure they win, expecting everyone else who bids just to put in market price bids. But they come cropper if there is a second "high roller" bidding in the same auction. Bidder A puts in the first bid, a maximum of £50 because that's what the item is worth and that's what he is prepared to pay. The auction now has 1 bid and the current price is £30 and the highest bidder is A. Bidder B puts in a "high roller" bid of £5,000. The auction now has 2 bids, the current price is £51 (£1 above A's maximum bid) and the highest bidder is B. Bidder A really wants this item, and so counts his coins and bravely puts in a bid of £60, knowing it's a bit above market value but he really, really wants it. The auction now has 3 bids, the current price is £61 and the highest bidder is B. Bidder A is getting red mist. He really, really wants it. He bids £70 knowing it's well above market price but damn it, he's going to have it! (I have NEVER done this...honest...). The auction now has 4 bids, the current price is £71 and the highest bidder is B. Bidder A sobs into his cup of tea. Bidder B is getting a bit nervous, but is confident the other bidder will stop because £71 is over market value. Bidder C notices the auction. He too would like the item. He can see that it's a bit over market value but assumes the other bidders' maximum bids won't be much more than £70-£80 because the item isn't worth any more than that. Ten seconds before the end of the auction he bids £10,000 because a) he thinks it funny, b) it's not like he's ever going to have to pay that much, but it will be above the whatever the other bidder has put on. The auction now has 5 bids, the current price is £5,001 (£1 above B's highest bid) and the highest bidder is C. Congratulations bidder C you have won and have 3 days to pay for your item. Bidder A chokes on his tea. Bidder B thinks what the... Bidder C stares silently at the screen. Bidder C eventually retracts his bid citing his finanances have changed. The seller asks bidder B to cough up as the next highest bidder - at this point I'm not sure if the eBay rules say bidder B is required to pay £71 which was the price when he was last the highest bidder, or £5,000 his maximum bid which got beaten by bidder C. Who knows. Either way everyone involved in the auction is annoyed.
Possibly worth looking at the bid history to aid understanding. I think @alcina has the right idea. It's interesting to see the high roller winning bid was put in very early (who knows how high it actually was) and was pushed very high by two other bidders.
@Robert Radcliffe it almost looks like 7***1 and 9***8 were just testing to see how high the original bidder x***6 had gone! Playing with him. If I'm reading this correctly 6***6 got red mist. 7***1 probably got a shock when he put in his highest bid and the price lept lept from £620 to £2,000, and yet he was still not the highest bidder. But then he pushed with another bid. And 9***8 joined the pushing party. It's not like these were snipes in the last few seconds when you can't see how much other people have also bid in the last second. There are 10s of minutes between the bids. You'd know full well what the current price was and you'd know it's way higher than market value. Presumably they figured if they accidentally exceeded the highest bid they'd just redact their bid. But clearly x***6 and 7***1 are what I describe as "high rollers", 9***8 is possibly a troll (or a mate of the seller trying to see what's going on), and poor old 6***6 is just a guy who really, really wanted that stove!
Auction monies really should be placed in a type of Escrow. It bidders want to get cute, well have at it. Final auction price stands. This would end all that nonsense.
This bid thing looks more like crooks land... I never bought anything like this. Usually around here in Romania ,if you wanna sell something you do put it on a site like olx. But no biding is requiered. Who wants it ,calls and either go get it physically in person(should the item be too heavy/big to ship by courier) or just has the item shipped to him. Only if the seller wants or trusts the buyer! This is how I got my Shmel-2 stove for about 50 euros. But I did returned one item years ago because it was nothing like what the seller said in the public add it was... Fettler is right: when you bid on something your bidding money should be on lock/hold . After all you wanna buy,right?! Anything else is just a waste of time. I wouldn't take part in this!
