Ebay Experience

I have heard of ebay. I mean, who has not heard of ebay before? But I have never bidded on anything on ebay or sold anything on it for the simple reason that I prefer to do my online shopping with regular shops with online presence. Plus there are so many horror stories about ebay. Bad buyers and sellers, scammers, and all that.

One day when I was too free, I decided to just look at ebay again and browse what is actually available there and I was amazed with the plethora of goodies put up for sale.

I decided to start my first bid on an Anya Hindmarch Be-A-Bag collection. I have always like this range but now Anya no longer does a ready to sell collection. Instead buyers get to bespoke their own Be-A-Bag using the pictures they like. While I appreciate the uniqueness of a customized bag, I also like to have some ready-made bags for choices. The reason why I never really bought the bag was the price point in Singapore, plus the designs didn't attract me then.

Anyway, so I saw this Dalmatian bag in blue which was NWT and bid on it. Being a newbie in bidding, I made several mistakes.

1. Bidding too early when there were still many days left before the auction ended.
2. Panic when someone else upped your bid.
3. Follow ebay's suggestion to up your own bid when you are already the leading bidder.

So because I made these mistakes, I pushed the amount to well over my budget even before the auction came close to an end. But at last, I finally understood why some people always monitored the bidding page during the last few minutes of the auction. And how someone could actually join the bid at the last minute and won the item right under your nose.

The Anya Hindmarch bag was finally won at US$182.50 by someone else in the final 6 seconds. D also mentioned how she won her item at the final 4 seconds.

Sometimes you do wonder if the auction could be fixed in the sense that someone else was just jacking up the prices all the time so that the final buyer would spend more than budgeted?

In any case, it was quite an experience on ebay. For those who prefer straight forward transaction, there are some auctions which do only "Buy It Now" so it was a case of just buy it if the price is right for you.

Happy bidding on ebay. There is also buyer's protection when you use Paypal to pay the seller when you won a bid or did a BIN.

But as with any online activity, one still needs to do their due diligence on researching the product and sellers, etc.

Image from ebay seller shoponine$$.