Thursday, December 2, 2010

Are You My Competition?

There were several nice comments left yesterday about the



newest addition to my collection. Thanks everyone for that!

A comment left by William got me thinking. He mentioned that he thought he was watching the auction for the card I won. My thought was, I wonder how often us card bloggers are watching the same auctions, and how often we are bidding against each other....and driving up the prices we pay.

Would it be a bad thing to let others know what auctions we are going to be bidding on? Personally, if I knew that another blogger was going to bid on an auction that I was watching, I would just step aside and let him have it. It wouldn't be too long before the same card shows up again, and then, there would be one less bidder to compete against. We could each get the card at a better price.

Is it against ebay's rules to do that? Is is un-American to mess with free enterprise?

Would you be willing to let others now what you are watching? Would you want to let others know?

5 comments:

  1. I belong to a couple of online groups, and this has been a point of discussion already. In some cases (for instance, a large lot), a couple/few collectors can agree to split an eBay lot, but when it comes to single cards, it won't hurt me if a fellow blogger/collector outguns me. When it comes to mainstream cards, if I miss one, another will eventually come along at my price.

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  2. On one hand, if you announce what items you're bidding on, other bloggers might avoid that auction.

    On the other hand, you're basically advertising the auctions and someone who might have never found the auction could decide to start bidding against you.

    If you know some people who collect (and bid on) the same stuff as you you could probably coordinate your bidding with them.

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  3. This may work for non-limited type cards, but once it gets to be something that there are only few examples of where you may not be able to just wait for the next one to pop up, I woubt you can get people to lay off.

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  4. I'm not too sure too many people bid on the same stuff I'm bidding on, but between the 4 or 5 people who blog that I'm really close to, I'm always showing them what I'm bidding on. Very interesting topic though.

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  5. I have had these same thoughts before... usually it is when I bid on an item with about 15 seconds left and fail to take the lead thus driving up the price... everytime I do that I always imagine the buyer going, well I'm glad my price just went up!

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