Buying in an auction.

[JohnIreland]

Three weeks ago today I very happily bought my car on BaT. I was the high bidder with a strong bid with about 30 or 40 seconds to go. I prevailed. Subsequent auctions confirm that I paid a fair price. However an auction today on BaT made me very uncomfortable. Curious if others have seen this happen on BaT.

A rare vintage Alfa Romeo was the car. With just minutes...maybe seconds...to go, the high bid at $275000, the auction clock suddenly went crazy and added an hour to the auction. For a couple of minutes the online auction time and those following it on iPhone differed. The seller and bidders didn't know what was going on. BaT then announce that the auction had been extended an addition hour.

At first there was no new bidding. Then in the last 20 minutes or so the price rose over $90,000 to the eventual price of $365,000. As nice and rare a car as it was...with a wonderful history and a good enough restoration...I have doubts that the auction would have gone up those $90,000 if the auction had ended on time. Perhaps in those original final moment it might have gone to $295,000 or maybe even $300,000...but I doubt it would have gone as high as that extra hour allowed it to. And a lot of bidders who were originally in the fight, never came back after the clock was reset.

When I bought a car on BaT three weeks ago, (again I won by placing a strong bid in the final 30 to 40 seconds) if they had suddenly added an extra hour to my auction, allowing lots of time for numerous new bids, and the new winning bid was now 30% more than my bid, I would have felt that my bidding agreement/contract with BaT had been violated since the auction didn't end at the scheduled time, and that BaT owed me that car or an equal one for the amount of my bid.

They sell a lot of Porsches on BaT. Am I out of line? Your thoughts.

[Kalashnikov]

What you did was sniping John. It works on Ebay and looks like it works on BaT too.

I am against sniping, as a seller.... Because it does exactly what you did with your car and prevents higher bids. Anti-sniper rule that automatically extends the auction by 15 minutes every time a bid is placed with 30 seconds to go is a good measure.

[gnat]

Sniping is why BaT continues adding time when bids come in in the last couple of minutes. I agree with Kalash that this is a good policy from both the buyer and seller perspectives. I stopped using eBay 15 years ago because I got tired of losing auctions from bids that didn't leave me time to see much less respond to.

As far as what John describes, yeah I'd be pissed. In the end, however, you never lost anything so demanding money you never spent or a car that sold to someone else is a pretty ridiculous stance to take in my opinion.

[32wildbilly]

Sniping is why BaT continues adding time when bids come in in the last couple of minutes. I agree with Kalash that this is a good policy from both the buyer and seller perspectives. I stopped using eBay 15 years ago because I got tired of losing auctions from bids that didn't leave me time to see much less respond to.

As far as what John describes, yeah I'd be pissed. In the end, however, you never lost anything so demanding money you never spent or a car that sold to someone else is a pretty ridiculous stance to take in my opinion.

WHAT? So you're telling me eSnipe won't work on BAT!? Damn!

[JohnIreland]

I can agree with anti snipping rules...but there has to be some counter balance. Allowing 15 additional seconds after a bid is made at the very end of the auction is one thing. I placed my bid at the end so I would not be bidding against myself. I also put in a bid that was definitely above all the other bids. Nobody was willing to match it, so I won. However if my bid had been basically voided at the last minute by extending the auction another hour, I would have felt screwed. It seems it was an unavoidable computer glitch in the case of the Alfa today. I'm sure the seller is very happy that by extending the auction an hour past its original conclusion time, the bids went up another 30+%. In fact reading the comments during the auction, it sounds as if the Alfa might not have met its reserve price if the end of auction hadn't been delayed/extended. If these glitches are common occurrences on BaT then they have work to do...and they should consider some fine tuning of their procedures. If this was just a once in a blue moon kind of thing then so be it.

[theprf]

BaT extends the auction for 2 minutes after the last bid (or is it 5 minutes?). That's in their agreement.

The Alfa is not the first high-dollar car to have this "computer glitch" thing happen, though. I was watching a Ford GT a couple weeks ago and a similar event happened. The comments on THAT auction implied that "computer glitches" are not uncommon.

[FRUNKenstein]

I think it is 2 minutes added on BaT after bids, so sniping (as in “snipe”) isn’t very effective on BaT. That being said, adding an hour is another story - it gives additional bidders time to come into the auction that may have missed out otherwise. However, I don’t believe this is something BaT would try because their commission is capped at $5,000. That means they earn the same $5,000 commission on every car that goes over $100,000, no matter if it is $100,001 or $1,000,001.

For a legal perspective, about 2 years ago, a local collector here was liquidating his collection at an in-person auction that was just his cars. This guy was/is a real piece of work - an old time car dealer who admitted in a speech at a local car club lunch that he regularly defrauded his customers by rolling back odometers (he actually had a guy on staff to just do rollbacks) and running up repair bills and having his mechanics tell people that parts were broken, showing them a broken part they kept from a previous job and then not even doing the repair at all. Really nice guy. Anyhow, at his auction (no reserve), one of our docents was the high bidder at something like $20,000 on a car. No one else was bidding on top of that. Just a split second before the auctioneer brought the gavel down to declare it sold, Mr. Nice Guy jumps up on stage, grabs the mic and declares the car is no longer for sale. He sold it about an hour later off the block for $28,000, while the auction was still going on.

The docent was obviously upset. He came to me a couple of days later and told me the story, which I confirmed with the auctioneer (“Yes, that’s exactly what happened, but we had no power to stop him from doing that.”). But,the hassle of suing Mr. Nice Guy over what was essentially an $8,000 claim wasn’t worth it to the docent, so he dropped it. I had even offered to do the legal work for free because I was going to enjoy suing that prick. But, filing fees, deposition and other discovery costs, having his own deposition taken, going through a trial and being wrapped up in it for 2+ years was enough for the docent to just say “screw it.”