eBay/Craigslist Why buy a tractor on eBay?

[CTyler]

</font><font color="blue" class="small">( I personally don't like the 'reserve price' method due to the fact I won't know until days later what the seller really wants for an item )</font>

My experiance is that the seller will, more often than not, tell you the reserve price if you sent them a polite email.

 

[CTyler]

The only time the price should jump is if another bidder is using a proxy. With proxy bidding you set your max amount and it will bid the price up to your maximum. Lets say an item is at $50 and you put in a proxy bid for $100. Another bidder already has a proxy bid for $99. The price will jump to $100 to out bid the $99 bid. Proxy bidding can jump the price up quite high immediatly depending on the bids.

 

[MarkV]

I am not an e-bay user and this discussion got me interested in taking a look. As I looked through pages and pages of items in the agricultural category it became frustrating wading through 100's of ads for 2-5 dollar manuals and different toys. Is there away to filter out certain items or price ranges? Also in doing a search for "tractors" in all categories it didn't seem to bring up everything that I saw when working through individual category headings. Any good tips from you regular e-bay users?

MarkV

 

[Inspector507]

Sort the search by "highest price" and the $1 items go to the bottom of the list. But you might miss some ads that the seller started out real low.

 

[Gatorboy]

MarkV,

If you go to the actual Search Page on eBay (http://pages.ebay.com/search/items/basicsearch.html), you have all sorts of filters you can setup -- Price Range, Words to exclude, Area of the country, etc.

If you are entering keywords, make sure you have the option checked to search Titles and Descriptions.

Try that out and see if you get better results.

 

[GSS]

It's all in how you search. You need to add as many applicable words as possible to your search string, but at the same time not eliminating stuff that you want to find. It's not easy and most of the time, you have to do a few different searches, b/c not everyone knows how to list their items to get the most hits either. For example, when I was looking for a tractor, I knew I wanted a 4x4, so I searched for '4x4 tractor'. But some list them as '4wd' or 'mfwd' or things like that. Unless the seller put all of these terms in the title, you will not necessarily find them. So I just do 3 different searches, each time pairing 'tractor' up with another term for 4x4. You can also save these searches in My eBay so you don't have to recreate it each time.

Another option is to use the advanced search. You can enter words to be eliminated from your search results, among other settings to narrow your search. In the above example, I would enter the word 'scale' in the words to eliminate, so that no toy tractors would be returned.

Sometimes though, you will just have to sift through hundreds of items. Frustrating, I know, but you may just find that diamond in the rough that no one else sees doing a search.

- Gerald

 

[DavesTractor]

</font><font color="blue" class="small">( Actually, one of my frustrations with eBay is that sellers do the following:

1) List an item without reserve
2) Wait until just before the end of the auction
3) If bid is less than they'll accept, cancel the auction )</font>

Chris, since eBay starting charging a bunch for reserve auctions a few months ago, many sellers have switched over to this method of cancelling at the last minute to avoid reserve price fees. I bid $10,250 on a '98 Dodge Cummins Dually 4x4 (OK, I was trying to steal it!) and ended up winning the auction at $5900, as the other bidder bid $5800 at the last second. The seller then refused to sell it to me as he said he intended to pull the auction at the last minute but forgot and the reserve, at least in his mind, was $13,500. I went through the normal eBay complaint channels, but never got the truck and the sellers is still selling in this manner. About 3% of his feedback was negative, which is way too high, and a good indicator of his integrity. I think eBay needs to watch the number of pulled auctions. A legitimate seller should seldom have to pull an auction.

 

[MarkV]

Jerry, Dave, Gerald, thanks for the hints. I'll give it another try and see what is out there.

MarkV

 

[Tractors4u]

As a seller I will tell you, yes the reserve price is the asking price. It is the least I will take. I have had auctions that ended without the reserve being met and was offered a price slightly lower. I took it too because I wasn't having to pay the eBay commision. The auction will end with no winner if the reserve price is not met. I don't know if it is as much an advantage as it is protection to the seller. Like one poster said, a seller does not want to give an item away just because there was little interest in it.

 

[normde2001]

Yep, that's pretty much what I said originally.