A Few Words About Ebay

I recently decided to try and upgrade my Rock Band setup a little bit. Get a real kick pedal, maybe a few other things. Make it so it is better at helping me learn to drum. I figured that I could get some used equipment for cheap, and Craigslist has turned out to be near useless in this regard, so I thought I would give ebay another try. Up until about two weeks ago, my only experience with ebay was buying a used Guitar Hero 3 guitar so that I had two guitars for RB. This was almost a year ago, so I was a little rusty.

After bidding on various things throughout the week, I have come to a few conclusions about ebay.

1) You can get some good deals if you get lucky.

2) People are jerks.

3) The end of an auction can get CRAZY.

To illustrate point 3, here's the approximate timeline for an item I bought recently. At the beginning I decided that I would pay $115, given the condition it's in:

5 days, 17 hours to go - The item is up for $20. I bid $100, so I am in the lead at $21.

2 days, 3 hours to go - Someone bids $30. I lead at $31.

0 days, 14 hours to go - Someone bids $40. I lead at $41.

0 days, 45 mins to go - Someone bids $80. I lead at $81.

0 days, 40 mins to go - I up my bid to $110. I still lead at $81.

0 days, 5 mins to go - someone bids $100. I lead at $101.

0 days, 1 min to go - they bid $111. I am no longer in the lead.

0 days, 45 secs to go - I bid $115. I lead at $112.

0 days, 20 secs to go - They bid $116. I am no longer in the lead.

0 days, 8 seconds to go - I bid $125. I am in the lead at $121.

Time expires before the other guy can outbid me again. I win at $121, which is $6 more than I wanted to pay. I know that it's still a good deal though - if I had bought that item new, it would easily cost me $250+. Here's the thing - I was easily the leader no question until less than an hour to go, and then it just got wild. Some people really like that about ebay...it gets on my nerves. I would rather just buy an item and get it over with.

This can just as easily go the other way though - there have been quite a few auctions over the last week where about 3 hours before it ended, the bids went higher than what I was willing to pay. I have won 4 auctions over the last couple weeks, but probably bid on 50 things.

Here's one of the things I bought - someone may be getting a gift soon (if you can read the inscription on the side it may be a clue). And no, this isn't what cost me $120 (it was more like $10):

A brief sidenote on scammers - they do exist on ebay and you have to be careful. I have a solid team of Internet Experts that help me out with this kind of thing (actually it's just Anderbra, but that's close enough). It's hard for me with my Frugalitis to buy things that I'm not sure about the quality, but so far so good I guess. Maybe i'm just not built for ebay. But as long as I keep finding deals on stuff that I want, I'll keep playing the game.