What is with super cheap gear on ebay?

[Glacies]

I see 3 guitars that I'd love to have, with bidding under $5 total ($50 shipping) on highly reputable sellers with listings with under 5 days left. Gotta be too good to be true, right?

[Eric***]

Maybe. The only way to know is to put in a bid and see what happens. Good luck!

[Glacies]

I'm going to wait until there's a day left and then bid $100 max. The one I have my eye on is a $800 guitar brand new being sold by a pawn shop with 100% positive feedback across a lot of sales. I don't think there's any way this thing goes for that price but I figure it wouldn't hurt to bid $100. If I get it that would be soemthing else. $100 is just about my gambling limit here, I don't need another guitar, but it would be cool.

[Eric***]

Why not just put in what you would be happy to buy it with right now on a sniping service like esnipe? They don't charge if you don't win, so you're good to go. No risk, huge reward if won.

[Glacies]

I have 6 buys off of ebay in the last 8 years, so I have no idea how a lot of it works.

edit to add, realistically, unless it's a ripoff, I could buy it for $500 and sell it on craigslist for more than that. So there has to be people camped on this thing waiting to do at least just that.

[Eric***]

http://www.esnipe.com/

It bids on your item of choice at the last second to battle people who camp out and poach items. If you realistically want these guitars and would buy them if you found them in a store for $200 or whatever, just put it in to bid $200 with 5 seconds remaining or something. If you win, you win. If you don't, you don't. You pay nothing if you don't win.

[Glacies]

Guitar bids went crazy last night. I knew it was unrealistic but I think I'm going to keep watch for this type of thing. Thanks for link.

[duhvoodooman***]

+1 on the automated snipe service idea. IMO, this is the only way to go for straight auctions. You decide what is the maximum amount you're willing to pay and enter that as your snipe max. bid. These services only bid the lowest amount needed to beat the current high bid, so you don't have to worry about overbidding. Set the snipe up to place your bid 5 sec. or so before the auction ends, which pretty much guarantees that nobody an manually outbid you before the auction ends. And since you're not on e-Bay watching the auction, there's no temptation to get into a "bidding war" and let emotion overtake reason. You'll get an e-mail when the auction ends, advising you that you either won the item or were outbid.

Incidentally, it's because the use of these sniping services has become so prevalent that the main activity on many auctions occurs within the last several seconds of the auction, and an item that has been sitting at a bargain price for days suddenly gets bid up & sells for much more.

[NWBasser]

http://www.esnipe.com/

It bids on your item of choice at the last second to battle people who camp out and poach items. If you realistically want these guitars and would buy them if you found them in a store for $200 or whatever, just put it in to bid $200 with 5 seconds remaining or something. If you win, you win. If you don't, you don't. You pay nothing if you don't win.

That's pretty cool. I had no idea there was such a service. Frankenfretter's fiancé sniped my G&L JB at the very last second for me and I got quite the deal on it.

[jtees4]

It's called an auction. Only the final bid is the actual price. So anything until then is totally meaningless.