Found a seller with a good product who put what I want up, one a day, pretty much every day, same item, guess he is a dealer. Always with a start price of about 15.00 and a BIN of 27.00.
Looked through his selling history of this item and discovered that some days they went for as low as 20.00 and very occasionally less. Always got bids though.
So I thought, I'll bag myself one of these with a bid group! First time I've really used a bid group you see. So added each occasion of this item from this guy to an AS bid group and just let it get on with it each day, with a 20.02 bid. After a while I had to update the bid group with his later sales because most of the early ones either went to BIN or a higher price than 20.02. In this second batch though I stomped the BINs on two of them with a minimum bid; sure enough this caused the BIN buyers to go buy his non-stomped items from later in the week.
[BIN-stomp: the act of placing the first, low, reserve-meeting bid with the intention of removing the Buy-It-Now option from that item and ensure it hangs around to become a proper auction item]
So tonight, one of these two that I'd stomped the BIN on comes along, AS gets a chance to do it's stuff because the bid is still quite low; and I won for only 19.00! Megabargain!
SO the moral of the story is that AS rules, AS bidgroups definitely rule too, and it pays to do a bit of research into a big seller's patterns, especially when not desperate for the item. And BIN-stomping makes it all the more sweeter due to the extra devious element!
Well Happy AuctionSniper 