More eBay/Pokemon minutia you didn't need or want to know!

Ah, yes, another day comes to a close, and with it another batch of auctions. I'm still a bit confused about what is really happening with this particular eBay vendor (is she no longer going to sell and is just dumping her stock of cards?), but I'm certainly happy to take advantage of this "fire sale" of cards going for a penny a piece! Starting on Monday she has her opening bids up to 35¢, so there is only a bit longer to go here (even though on some cards, 35¢ is a swell deal, but with shipping it pushes a lot of the less valuable cards out of that magic "1/7th of retail" range that I like to target). So, our updated totals are:

                   Total number of auctions won:   60
                   Number of auctions won for 1¢:   41
                   Total cost of all auctions:   $9.41
                   Total value of cards won:   $316.00

Needless to say, I'm amazed that the total for all those cards (60 wins so far) hasn't broken the $10 mark yet, and this is the aggregate total of 9 days or so of bidding! Pretty cheap entertainment.

Unfortunately, I finally hit some "serious competition" tongiht. Generally, with the possibility of picking up cards for one cent, I wasn't bidding on things where somebody had beat me to it. While I did snag a couple of things that we "needed" specifically, I let a lot of things slide unchallenged. However, I lost two auctions tonight to some guy with a bot ... which was quite irritating. On one of them (where I'd set a relatively high bid), he came in with 1:20 left and shot in bids :15, :12, :10, and :13 apart. I actually might have snagged that back, but my last-minute bid (with 0:26 remaining) was exactly his high bid, if I'd guessed a penny more, I could very well have kept that in the "win" column. This guy later zipped in on another card I was about to win (but this was duplicate of one we already had, so I had put in a much lower max bid), again with about 1:20 left on the clock, and shot in a couple of bids in quick succession to take that as well.

This latest bot-bidder pisses me off, as the eBay ID has only been around from earlier this month (with just six star points) ... so it's either somebody who is new and aggressive and has studied all the eBay tools (and knows what to go for, how to time the bids, how to space the bid increases, etc.), or it's somebody who's set up a fake ID just to snipe. I'm betting on the latter. While in the over-all scheme of things, losing a few cards here isn't a big deal (hey, I've won 60 in this latest binge!), but it really is unpleasant to be paying attention ot one's auctions and seeing that one is winning somethng with about a minute to go, and then, suddenly, WHAM! some damned bot has swooped in, strafing a half a dozen rapid-fire bids, and grabbed away your prize just when you were preparing to pay for it! Bleh.

But, then again, if you're reading this far down in one of my eBay posts, you already KNOW how I feel about those damnable sniping bots!