Aaaargh! Ebay....

[Dak Mechanic]

Are ASA headsets any good?

Hope so 'cos I just won one on Ebay:\ Didn't mean to. Honest. It was at £25 with a few minutes to go and and thought it was worth a punt at £26. Unused. With a case..

It was described as a BSA Headset, but a quick STFW soon sorted that out.

Blasted Ebay!! Cost me a fortune over the last few weeks...

JC

[whiskylima]

Don't panic! I bought an ASA headset, through ebay, not long after I started flying nearly 4 years ago. 150 hours later it is still giving excellent service, no complaints at all. Phil.

[Nil Flaps]

Sorry, not good at abbreviations or acronyms so I don't know what STFW means. :} But at 130 squid (or 90 best price), it saved you, not cost you.

Better still, I've been looking for cheap headsets for the time I can start to take a passenger and given what I was thinking of getting beforehand, your last minute bidding idea is obviously the best way to get a bargain - so you've saved me a few squid now too. Onyer! :ok:

Let us know how they go.

[Dak Mechanic]

STFW means Surf The Web (or words to that effect :E ).

If you are after a last minute Ebay bargain, use Auction Stealer (www.auctionstealer.com) - it's free and gives you 3 snipes per week, bidding for you in the last 20 seconds. Bloomin' well works too! Pay $7:00 and get more snipes, but I've never needed to do that.

Having said that, the headset was won with a manual bid a few minutes early. It's not my normal style though :) I never bid on anything I really want until the very end - why let anyone else see your interest and bid stuff up unecessarily?

Thanks for putting my mind at rest, although buying it still seems a bit OTT for a low hours PPL!

JC

[IO540]

All serious Ebay users use a sniping site, to put in a bid in the last few seconds. That way, you can also amend/delete your "bid" at any time before the end; Ebay doesn't see anything.

Bidding earlier is completely pointless - you just show your hand and draw in the amateurs who have no idea of their limit and they just drive the price up.

I use this (http://www.esnipe.com)site.

[rotorcraig]

Don't pay for sniping software - as is usually the case, there is perfectly good free software out there.

eg http://www.jbidwatcher.com/

RC

[Whirlybird]

Those of us who sell on ebay thoroughly enjoy watching the bidding go insane in the last 30 seconds. :ok:

[Keef]

I don't mess about with sniping software. I just put in a max bid of what I'm prepared to pay, and let the auction continue normally, as is the intention of auctions. If I win, by definition I'm happy. If it goes over my max, I don't want it at that price. Why would I want to snipe?

Sometimes, folks go bananas and pay way over the odds - I've seen second-hand items go for substantially more than a new one would cost. I've also had some stunning bargains.

I bought a new cellphone recently - a Motorola V3im. The first one I bid on was at £80 five minutes before the end, and went for about £160. Two snipers had overloaded their magazines, I assume. I got mine for £60 plus P&P - 3 months old, unused. I suppose the snipers didn't find it.

[BRL]

I have just been bloody 'Sniped'. It is not right, it is like cheating.

Unhappy Mod.

[rotorcraig]

It is not right, it is like cheating.
I actually agree, but increasingly if you bid on eBay you're probably going to get sniped. So I've joined in, and now win more auctions.
I just put in a max bid of what I'm prepared to pay, and let the auction continue normally, as is the intention of auctions. If I win, by definition I'm happy. If it goes over my max, I don't want it at that price.
I put a max bid into the sniping software, and let the auction continue. My bid goes in 20 seconds before the auction ends and I either win or I don't.

But I haven't "shown my hand" early, allowing other bidders to decide to go higher, or snipers to set their snipe up a bit higher. I haven't paid any more than I would have done manually ... if fact because my bid went in 20 seconds before the auction ends there's 0% chance that I'll see I'm losing and be tempted to try another £5 just to see...

Maybe I'm a bad person :(

RC

[Dak Mechanic]

No not a bad person - Nothing wrong with good forward planning! Why trust to luck?

JC

[IO540]

The "problem" with Ebay is that it is an open auction.

The "problem" with any open auction is that amateur bidders (those who don't have a firm idea of their max and get carried away) see all the open bids and keep upping their bid to exceed them. They sit there in front of their PC, watching the other bidders, and get all nervous. You can see this plainly if you look at the bidding.

This is good for sellers, who get a lot more than they would get in a sealed-bid auction. I have sold stuff on Ebay (not junk; I never sell junk on there) for amazing amounts. Lots of people but and sell all the time and even make a small margin. If you buy e.g. a camera for £500 you can sell it (clean condition) on Ebay 2 years later for £250; this would have been totally and utterly impossible before Ebay came along (£80 in a secondhand camera shop, maybe).

It's also very good for Ebay.

But it's not good for buyers who have to outbid all the amateurs.

If you bid on Ebay with say £500, then Ebay will conceal the £500 figure and will present your bid as (roughly) X+£1 where X is the highest other bid. So if somebody bid £10, your £500 bid will show up as £11. Every time somebody ups X, Ebay resubmits your bid at a quid more - up to your £500 limit of course (but your £500 figure remains invisible, until the figure itself has been reached). This is a clever mechanism but it produces frenzied bidding among the amateurs who are bidding manually because every time they increment their bid they see you (what they think is you but it's actually Ebay's computer) incrementing yours.

If you know how much you want to pay, you are much more likely to get the item if you snipe than if you open-bid.