The importance of auctions observation.
“So if you know the place and time of the battle, you can join the fight from a thousand miles away. If you do not know the place and time of the battle, then your left flank cannot save your right, your right cannot save your left, your vanguard cannot save your rearguard, and your rearguard cannot save your vanguard, even in a short range of a few to a few dozen miles.”- Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Following part I & II.
Now, do you see just how important it is to watch auctions and “get to know your competition?”
The bidders that are intently watching will see that the bidder who appears to have placed upwards of $1k in bid m (granted you’ll have to have been watching this for a few hours) and didn’t win likely didn’t want to lose their bids, so they used to buy it now to get their bids back. Say they spent approximately $1k in bids. Maybe even more if they purchased the bids during a bid promotion.
Each bid placed by a bidder resets the auction clock by 10 seconds. Can you imagine just how long the $1k auction would go on for? 1 bid = an additional 10 seconds may equal 55,500 seconds (more or less). That is equal to perhaps at least 15 hours of bidding, then add another bidder bidding against this one bidder, and others now and then. That is if the timer was reset each time towards the very last second of bidding (more on why you shouldn’t always bid last minute in a future tips article). Depending on the number of opponents and the frequency of all users bidding, these two bidders could bid for well over 20 hours! Of course, not all auctions last this long, but it has happened! This just goes to show that an online auction on iBid for a popular, high priced item could take a lot of time before it sees an end.
At $5.00 auctions are closed to new bidders, this is a good idea as it helps to decrease auction times and competition.
Should you be a power bidder?
It is really up to you to decide, and there are other strategies that you could use that you will be able to learn about here in this blog in future articles.
Just remember it takes time, focus, patience, and money (or winning a lot of bid pack auctions) to be a “power bidder.”
What do you think of the power bidder strategy? Are you glad that iBid sets both time and win limits?
We want to hear from you and would be honored to feature your bidding stories here.
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