A Bianchi mountain bike, was going for $9.99 until a few minutes ago, suddenly a newbie with zero feedback starts bidding it up in the last half hour of the auction...

My guess is eBay will be all too happy to take their cut on this shill auction.

seems normal to me... stupid but legit

Well, it's either legit, or the seller got a shill account to get her out of a low-priced sale. Last 30 minutes, low bid price, newbie with zero feedback makes me suspicious.

probably just a case of new-bee PMS (premature sniping)

We were all newbies at one time.

I had a newbe bid up the price on one of my bikes in the last hour. I had to talk her through the biding process on the phone. It was a legit sale .

GOOD catch, I haven't pondered the shill aspect 'till now, not much anyway. I'm leery of the ones that sell 4,782 items in a year,not stores either, alot of bikes, bike theives or fences perhaps. Of COURSE e-bay wouldn't object to any of this.

Cloaked bdding changes the old rules of the game, shill's can hide, it does not appear to be that difficult to create a new persona. The moral, snipe or go broke being forthright. Even the Japanese bidders have adapted to sniping, they are not fools with their money...

The old tactic of looking who is bidding and (sometimes) understanding their habits is no more. There was one guy who never bid over $2,500. for any bike.

Ebay is what it is. There is not much you can do about it and I don't worry about those things where I have no control. However, I find I'm looking at ebay and bidding way less than I used to and spending way more time on craigslist.

Are you sure it isn't a simple matter of the bidder fresnomayo bidding $11 but specifying a higher maximum bid of $25, and someone tried to bid against him resulting in ebay increasing fresnomayer's bid stepwise to the maximum?

And if the person were a shill they failed...they bought the bike. A good shill would have made sure you bought the bike!

I've had a bad run on both sites lately. Lots of misrepresented junk. The latest was Saturday morning after driving an hour and a half for DIBS! on a $35 Coppertone Schwinn cruiser, the seller calls just before I arrive and tells me he took a closer look at the bike and it's actually a Murray (and a rust bucket at that). Arrgg!!!

So in an attempt to turn another disappointment into an opportunity, I realize I'm only about 10 miles from a large flea market I've been meaning to check out. Hey, flea markets have been good to Bikedued so why not? Another bust. Only 5 bikes and not one adult bike in the bunch.

Swing by Salvation Army and Goodwill on the way home (at least they're next to each other). Same result. I give up.

I see absolutely nothing unusual or suspicious about that auction. The guy got the bike he wanted for a fair price. If somebody wanted it more, he could have tried to outbid him. That's how auctions work. I've made multiple bids like that when I'm trying to find the reserve price. I've got 135 transactions on eBay, mostly buys, and I've never had a problem. I've even had sellers give me a refund because shipping cost less than they expected.

Nothing suspicious at ALL ? I like the place too but many scams occur, not e-bat's fault,maybe. As a poster pointed -out, it's way easy to set-up a shill. The unussual IS THE ussual is more like it; bikes listed with wrong sizes, prices suspiciously low or high, weird freight costs. I bid on a saddle yesterday, it started at 9,each time I bid , I was immediately out-bid by 50 cents, I'm saying same nano-second,this continued 5 times,I stopped. An automatic server function or such had been put into play . It is what it is allright.. kooky !

But that just means someone had already bid higher than you if I'm understanding your description. Example: If someone has put in a maximum bid of $50 on something, the current price is, say, $27, and I bid $30, it will show that I've been outbid by .50 or whatever, bringing the price to $30.50. Then I bid $31, it then shows a high bid of $31.50. This will continue until I top the other bidder's price of $50. Is that the type of scenario you're talking about?

It's called proxy bidding. I think the real problem is a lack of understanding of how the system works. It's all explained on the site.

Proxy Bidding
The feature of an auction-style listing in which eBay automatically bids on the buyer's behalf, up to the maximum amount they set. Enter the maximum amount you're willing to spend on an item, and eBay will continue to bid incrementally for you until either you're the high bidder or your maximum is reached. This means you don't have to keep coming back to bid every time someone else places a bid.

Dirtdrop explains it well.

I just cut and pasted.

Well, I had no intention of bidding on that bike anyway, I was just watching. But that's not all a shill can do to be successful. A shill can in essence allow the seller to keep from selling a bike at a low price, by making the "winning" bid.

That's true, but a seller can avoid a low price sale using a reserve price.

I really think the auction you observed was normal and appropriate. Fresnomayo wanted the bike and he wanted it cheap, so he waited to late in the auction, and then he bid $11 with a $25 maximum. An inknown bidder then made repeated attempts to bid a little over his price and ebay reponded by bumping fresnomayo's bid stepwise to $25. Meanwhile, Fresnomayo sees this going on and gets scared he might lose his first auction, so he submits a new maximum of $50, preventing lvgolden from outbidding him.

The only thing that is a little unclear (to me) is why some of the bid times, like ajtcufrog's, seem to be out of chronological order, but that's probably just some glitch in how ebay displays bid times.