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Looper's Delight
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>>The best way is to just put in your max and forget about it, don't watch >it till the end - you either got it or not, both is good...<< agreed. bidding wars are of limited appeal as a sport. have you noticed how everything is "rare" aswell? basically, if you start low on something relatively obscure, & no-one else bids, & you lose out at the last minute by 50 cents, it was the seller. the seller outbid you so he could relist it when the market's ready to pay more for whatever it was. he was just testing the water, so to speak. I've bought lots of stuff on ebay- over 200 items- some of them small & insignificant, sure, but I have also bought basses, guitars & keyboards for several thousand dollars. my rule (& this will vary for others, depending how much disposable income you have) is that anything that looks like it will go over $500 US, I will make some major effort to establish the character of the seller. I ended up having an email correspondence with eric stewart (10CC guitarist) because of this, when I bought a nice 1963 precision from him. another time I carried on emailing with a guy in australia who sold me a fretless rick 4001.... but a guy who said he was in spain & who tried to get me to do a wire transfer of $2000 for a 1969 fender bass disappeared very quickly when I said I'd got a cheap flight & would meet him at the airport to do the deal. look at the text details of their feedback, not just the number. a fraudster of even fairly limited imagination will have set up several ebay accounts- half a dozen or more- & performed scores of buy-it-now "transactions" with himself to build up what looks like a healthy feedback score. if the scoundrel can be bothered, he will have tried to make his feedback comments look like they came from several real buyers- this will be reflected not only in their use of english but also the typing style (caps, exclamation marks & the like.) ask lots of questions, even if you don't really need to. get more pictures, especially if you think the listing pics might just have been swiped from another listing or someplace else on the interweb. but above all, don't get sucked into a bidding war. put in your best offer, like you (mentally) would if you were going into a shop. avoid round numbers- if I want to place a bid for around $300 for something, I will put $303 or something. it's a bit harder for people to only-just outbid you if you do this. it's an auction, not a computer game. sure, it's annoying to get sniped by a measly 50 bucks when you're up around $2500 dollars for something you really really want, especially when the winning bid is from someone who's (apparently) expressing their first interest in the item. these are usually either the seller themselves or a trade dealer, periodically trawling the listings for things that are more-or-less book value & that are ending within a few minutes. I think that's what happened to the 8-string rickenbacker I went after a few months ago.... the sensible thing to do is, from time-to-time, go to a real shop & get grounded again. this is especially true for guitar purchases. d.