Dear Fellow A.S. Users,
Let me start by saying that A.S. users are no different from any other ebay bidders, they want to win, and at the lowest possible cost, without sitting at their PC's all day and night, and keeping voluminous manually written lists of items.
Now there are several possible scenarios with an ebay item that you maybe interested in bidding for;
1 - You see an item that's; a) n/r, b) low start bid, c) no-one's bid much if anything on it yet. Now this item may not be the type of item you would normally bid for, but it gets your bargain juices flowing. Maybe you could land this item for a song, then turn around, now or sometime later, and resell it at a handy little profit. Well you're never going to be able to do it if you start bidding on it now, thereby causing attention to be drawn to it. People are like sheep (my Lord once said that I think), and if you bid on it, they will start to think that it's worth something, simply because you did through bidding on it. No, what you need is a tactic that allows you to wait until the last possible moment to bid, thereby drawing the minimum attention and counter bids. That used to mean keeping lists of the times when the items would be about to close, and basically sitting at the PC 24 hours a day, making sure you could make your bids at the last possible moment. The tools ebay provides are hopeless for that, since item tracking only allows a max of 20(!) items to be followed (why?). Way too few for the above purposes.
Voila A.S.! Just the tool we've needed all along. We're not anymore immoral than we were before, we just have a tool now that allows us to bid efficiently at the last minute, without having to sit it at the PC night and day. We used to bid like this before, just not as effectively.
You see, the problem really is ebay's. How many of you out there have been to a real live auction? You'll have noticed that obviously there are several differences, the most impotyant of which in relation to the morality discussion is the "forced" close time that ebay imposes. It's ENTIRELY ebays fault. Why do they ru the auctions that way? Why not instead, close the auction after the close date and time, but on a flexible time. It should close instead, for instance, after there have been no more bids received for 60 seconds. Everything else would remain the same, but after the close date and time has passed, there is an additional 60 seconds for anyone to place a bid. If they do, then from the time they do, then there is another 60 seconds until the auction closes. If there are no more bids in that 60 seconds, the auction closes to the highest bidder. Otherwise there must have been another bid, and then it continues on and on and on until there are no more bids for a 60 second period.
Basically what that would do is kill A.S.'s business mostly. Oh, they'd still do business with people who couldn't be around to bid at the auction close, but it would restore the integrity of the auction close. Anyone who wanted could bid at theend of the auction, and the seller would get the maximum price he/she could command from the bidders on-line at that point.
Well, what do you think?
David
For God so loved the world that He gave his only Son ...