Ebay bidding advice please?

Question

I just bidded for something on ebay and it said "Enter more than £2.00" so i put £2.10 and then it all of a sudden said that I was outbidded so I bid a bit more again and the same thing happened.
I checked the list of people who where bidding and it shown someone who bidded yesterday, yet their bids kept increasing when ever I did a bid. So I just typed £9 in the box and it all of a sudden said I was the winning bidder and that the current bid is at £3.74 and that the next bidder has to bid more than £9.
I'm so confused by the system lol
Can someone explain. Thanks

Answer 1

if someone has placed a max bid of say a tenner and no one else is bidding yet they will the winning bidder with just 99p. Then you come along and bid £2 expecting to win, but their tenner is larger so they are winning with a bid of £3. You then bid £5 and they are still winning with £6. You then go mad and bid £15 now you really are winning.



Its really quite simple as someone has placed a bid up to a max bid which may be considerably higher than what you are currently bidding. What you have to do is keep bidding until you exceed their max bid, as long as you are prepared to pay the price of course.

Answer 2

You were seeing "proxy bids".



It works like this:



Say you see something you want and the current bid is $8.90. You know that the maximum price you would pay is $20.00. You can enter a proxy bid of $20.00 (this way whenever anyone bids 9.00 - 10.00 etc. you will automatically outbid them until the bid exceeds $20.00).



When you bid for 9 you exceeded the amount of anyone else's proxy/automatic bids; this is why you were the winning bidder at this point.



Hope this helps.

Answer 3

It is simple enough, you should figure out how much you will pay, enter that bid, all bids under that will miss, as you found, if the bid is only one cent, you will get the article. I have actually done so.And quite often the bids going up are by the seller, or friends. A vicious world out there, happy bidding.

Answer 4

When you place your bid you can put the maximum you are willing to pay then if someone else bids lower than your highest price you automatically outbid that person.... hope that makes sense :D

Answer 5

when you place bid, you can place your maximum bid

so when you put 2.10 in, as someone had already put there maxiumum as more than that, it automatically outbid you