Bid to Win on Ebay (Paperback)

by Patrick C. Cook (Author) "We start our exploration by taking a look at what strategic bidding is all about..." (more)
Key Phrases: snipe bidder, typical closing price, screen portion showing, Proxy Discovery Run, Adjustment Bid, Square Trade (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Bid to Win on eBay is exclusively dedicated to bidding in online auctions. With focus on eBay, this book discusses bidding tactics and techniques for anyone who wants to participate in online auctions in a highly competitive manner. But this book is not just another how-to-bid-on-eBay book. Rather it delves into bidding tactics to a depth you never thought possible.

Bid to Win on eBay presents its material in three parts: Foundations, Tactics and Techniques and The 44 Laws of Strategic Bidding. A glossary of online auction related terms is included as well as the book index.

After the Introduction, Foundations outlines the fundamental principles of being a savvy bidder. Discussion begins with the target price, a very important aspect of strategic bidding. This is followed by a discussion of the bidding budget - the tactical use of the money you've allocated to win the auction. Next, compelling reasons are presented for exploring the auction's landscape to remain aware and alert. Finally, strategic planning and deploying bidding tactics are discussed.

The next part, Tactics and Techniques, is core to Bid to Win on eBay. Powerful bidding tactics are discussed including positioning tactics, proxy bidding tactics, bidding tactics in reserve auctions, minimum bidding tactics, bidding tactics with cents and the adjustment bid. Not to be forgotten is the notorious snipe bid tactic where you will get the inside scoop about the snipe bidding tactic - how to snipe bid, its risks and its rewards. This part concludes with a discussion of bidding techniques such as ultra fast bidding and double browser bidding.

Bid to Win on eBay continues with 44 laws of strategic bidding where real-world issues and topics are presented in a no-nonsense manner. The Laws help you apply tactical bidding methods and discuss important issues to help you remain aware and alert.

Here are a few of the 44 Laws of Strategic Bidding:

Law #3: Never Think of Yourself as Winning. This Law helps you understand that by being the highest bidder during the auction you present yourself as the one to outbid.

Law #8: Don't Focus on the Current Price. This important Law discusses the risks of bidding against the auction's current price.

Law #12: Understand Current Price Escalation. Every successful bid in a single-unit auction increases the current price. But the current price increase normally occurs gradually, in palatable amounts. This is by design. This Law delves into a dynamic that few realize - these palatable increases to the current price make it easy to bid again, pulling bidders back to bid time and again.

Law #19: Leverage the Bid History. What did you see the last time you looked at an auction's bid history? This Law shows you how to glean more information from the bid history than you thought possible.

There are 40 more laws for your consideration.

Bid to Win on eBay is for when you wear the bidder's hat. In a sea of how-to-sell-on-eBay books, this book is the first devoted exclusively to bidding. But when you sell on eBay this book will help you better understand the expectations and concerns of your prospective bidders.

Bid to Win on eBay is a thinker's book. It gets you thinking about strategy in the often highly competitive online auction environment; about the importance of information; about assessing where you intend to spend your money and about your safety. Bid to Win on eBay will ask you to look closely at what you are doing as you place bids; how your bids impact your competitive position; how your opponents may respond to your bids and how you respond to theirs and much more.

With Bid to Win on eBay at hand you have a ready reference of various bidding tactics you may find useful in the auctions you participate in. You'll be more informed of the methods, tactics and techniques that will help you enjoy your online auction purchasing experiences. Your perception of what's really going on will be heightened and you can be more competitive and alert to the traps laid for the unsuspecting. And, perhaps for the first time, you'll appreciate that online auctions are competitive purchasing situations that often require more than simple bidding.

From the Author
I get a kick out of winning eBay auctions. It's great to reel in a collectable camera, a high-end laser office printer I could never have afforded otherwise or re-discovering that neat set of building blocks I had when I was ten years old and long ago lost track of. But there's more to becoming a skilled buyer in online auctions than picking up a good buy from time-to-time. It's about fine-tuning our competitive skills, about thinking before acting and about being aware and alert. So the underlying theme of my book is not just about bidding in online auctions, it's about how to think like an online auction winner so you can be one.

If you are an occasional buyer from online auctions, thinking strategically will enhance the pleasure of taking ownership of the items won via online auctions. If you buy from online auctions for your business, you already know the value of being a smart buyer. If you buy on eBay to resell, you need to do it better than everyone else. If you sell on eBay, it is important to understand the perceptions bidders have and the patterns they follow. Whatever your eBay objectives are, Bid to Win on eBay has something for you.

Product Details

• Paperback: 280 pages
• Publisher: Pagefree Publishing (January 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1589611403
• ISBN-13: 978-1589611405
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,447,597 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A studious, in-depth analysis of the Ebay auction system, March 18, 2004

By	"mweiss150" (New Milford, CT United States) - See all my reviews

Bid to Win on Ebay provides a systematic approach to buying items on this auction venue. It's so easy to assume that one knows all there is to know about bidding, but reading this book reveals that there are three major approaches to bidding and choosing the one appropriate for your needs is one thing this book will help you do.
This book also brings to light many pitfalls of certain common bidding strategies that seem like "common sense" but lead to commiting one's self to a much higher auction price than one might have anticipated at the start of an auction.
Another thing this book teaches is how to have the proper mindset. Losing an auction can be anywhere from acceptable to devastating, emotionally, depending on mindset. Understand Law 9 from this book will help you avoid the mindset that will lead to unpleasant feelings should you not be the high bidder in an auction.
Included are useful tables of closely-guarded Ebay bid increments and other information that only someone deeply familiar with the inner workings of Ebay could know. At the very least, this book puts a whole host of figures and facts at your fingertips for easy reference before, during and after an auction.
One especially fascinating portion of this book is how to decipher bidding histories. To the layman, it's just a list of who's bidding, but Mr. Cook analyzes it and breaks it down in such a way that several types of bidders can be spotted and identified, giving you an advantage of knowing what strategies others are using.
Finally, there are many lessons in "buyer beware"--pitfalls in auction terminology that can mislead buyers into thinking they are receiving something other than the actual item the seller intends to ship.
Ironically, this book will probably become the "bible" for Ebay sellers, because it comprehensively discusses a wide range of possible bidding strategies--knowing how the bidding works, the seller can benefit too! So this book is multifunctional, as it serves the buyer/bidder AND the seller. Knowledge is power. This book is chock full of both!

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent EBay Reference, April 19, 2004

By	(ph ) (NYC, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This book is a great tool for the serious EBay bidder. Informative and well laid out it provided me with a wealth of information on the nuances of making a successful bid while getting the best price and steering way from cons. The book contains a lot of examples and illustrations detailing the concepts and is helpfully tabbed for quick reference. Definitely better then the "Dummies" book.

3.0 out of 5 stars Not as useful as I had hoped . . ., December 14, 2006

By	George Silver "A Reader in ..." (Belfast, ME USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I jumped into this book with high hopes, but for me it was a bit of a disappointment. It IS all about bidding and not just about selling--which is certainly a good point, but the execution of the book's concept had at least two serious flaws in my opinion:

1. The book is very repetitious. It tells you over and over not to blindly follow the rising price of an auction allowing yourself to sucked into an escalating price. It tells you over and over in many different ways to not consider yourself as a buyer, but as a negotiater who is manipulating the auction and exercising some (albeit small) influence on how high the price goes. It tells you over and over to research the product, the seller, and the other participants in the auction. All of these things are very important, but I don't think they need to be said so many times. Nor do they all need to be summarized again in the last half of the book where they are represented as "rules."

2. The book introduces interesting concepts and ideas, but doesn't really show how to apply these ideas in a very practical way. For example, Cook introduces the idea of tactical proxy bidding at considerable length but doesn't really go thru the details of how (and especially WHEN) to apply it. I ended my read-through of the book with the feeling that tactical proxy bidding was really important, but that I needed to devote a great deal of time figuring out just how to use it in specific auctions and situations. In other words, the book is less about the nitty gritty of bidding than it is an introduction to some ideas (some of which were new to me) which I need to consider and study much more on my own. In short, it's much more an invitation to systematically investigate eBay for yourself than it is a handy instruction guide.


All in all, I wouldn't say the book is bad, but don't buy it thinking you are going to learn a lot of immediately applicable tricks that will definitely save you money. Do buy it if you'd like to reconsider your style of bidding on eBay and other auction sites. There are a number of ideas in this book you'll probably find interesting to pursue on your own. (But it's definitely NOT for beginners.)

Maybe a way of summing up my feelings about the book is to say it left me saying to myself, "Now, where is that silver bullet I thought I was promised....?"