Posted by Anyone who follows my blog will know that I do a lot of shopping on ShopGoodwill.com. The other day I found a used air fryer with a starting price of $9.99. This model was going for around $50 on Ebay, so I put it on my favorites list. The next day someone placed the first bid. I decided to put in my bid 11 hours before the end of the auction. My max bid was $26.50, and the price jumped to $16. I knew the max bid of the first bidder was $15. About 5 1/2 hours later, someone put in a bid of $17 and my bid automatically moved to $18. Just before the auction closed, someone placed a bid for $26.52. They had placed a bid 2 cents higher than mine on the first try and won the auction! With tax and shipping their final price would be about $47.
The auction had a $1 bid increment, so I looked at the help section under bidding on an item. The first question on the list was: “Why was the winning bid less than the bid increment amount higher than my bid?”. This tells me that this happens often enough to be the number one question people ask about bidding. Here is the example they give: “If the first bidder enters a bid of $11, the item price would remain $10 but the next minimum bid would increase to at least $11.00. Any bid amount $11.00 or higher would then be acceptable. Therefore, the next bidder could then enter a bid amount of $11.02. They would then become the high bidder, the item price would increase to $11.02, and the next minimum bid would become $12.02.”
I guess this can go both ways. If they had bid $26.49, I would have won. But since their bid was more than the $1 bid increment and higher than my bid, they won the auction. The thing that has me skeptical is that the bid price at the time was $18. They decided to put in a bid that was $8.52 higher, which just happened to be 2 cents higher than my max bid. How can this happen, unless you knew what my max bid was? Seems like more than just a lucky bid could be in play here. I can’t prove anything, but Goodwill has a track record of questionable hiring and pricing behavior. How hard would it be for an insider to view the max bids and use that information in their favor. I’ve been on Ebay since 2010 and have never lost an auction by such an unusually close margin.