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The optimal strategy for winning eBay auctions seems so obvious that it shouldn’t need to be said, especially to the people who I know are reading this. Take time to decide the most you’re willing to spend on an item (considering the shipping cost), watch the item forever, and in the last 45 seconds of the auction (or less if you’re especially bold), bid that max amount. This is called sniping the auction, and it’s not considered a nice thing to do, but other buyers can take care of themselves and you’re not doing anybody any favors by collaborating to jack up the price for everyone over a series of days. If you won’t be around when the auction ends, it’s still in your best interest to bid at the last minute that works for you, and if you forget in the meantime, then you’re dumb and didn’t really need whatever it is anyway. I dumbly forget auctions all the time, but if an item is really going to make my life better, I’ll be watching the auction like a hawk.

Pretty obvious, right? The amount an item is worth to you shouldn’t hinge on how many other people want it. There’s a maximum you can afford and a maximum amount of money that you’d gladly give away to own the item, and the lower of the two figures should be your maximum bid. But really, almost nobody on eBay thinks this way.

So recently, after many years of buying crap on eBay, I’ve begun selling. Like a maniac. And though I’ve had a fair amount of success with it, I always expect my auctions to jump up in the last moments, where the people who really want the item make a go for it. But it never goes like that.

It happens like this: you list a group of items, and in the first 2 days (of 7), you pick up a lot of watchers. These users who are keeping tabs on your auction are not aware of how many other people want the item—only how many people have actually bid, which is zero. And if some poor fool comes along and agrees to pay your $0.99 starting bid, it’s all over. After you have one bid, other people want to get in on the fun, and pretty soon you’re selling your crappy old jeans for $40 (which I did today times 3). If you have a trillion watchers on an item but nobody takes the plunge in those first few days, by the last day you’ll only have 3 watchers left and you’ll wind up selling something for way below its value. Every time an item I’ve listed sees an early bid, the number of watchers increases kind of logarithmically over time and winds up selling for more than I expected. Every time i list an item that sees no bids in the first few days, the number of watchers rapidly spikes and decays, and I end up making a run to the post office for five dollars. It definitely seems that as a seller, your profit margins are inversely proportional to the intelligence of your clientele.

I really don’t get it—Lotto tickets, I get. I won’t argue the point that playing the Lotto is the dumbest investment that you can make, but some people acknowledge that they’re throwing their money away and do it willingly because a buck is a pretty fair price for a fantasy and it’s nice to drive home and think of what you’ll do when you have $23.8 million. And the logic is based on math that isn’t that accessible to most people—the potential payoff is huge and it’s not really obvious to someone who doesn’t have all the numbers on hand to crunch that the return on your one dollar investment can very neatly round to negative one dollar. Ebay buyers aren’t looking to waste money—presumably they’re all there to get the item for the lowest possible price. It blows my mind that early bidding is so common, that incremental bidding (“it’s up to 12 dollars? fine, i’ll bid 13. Doh! Not high enough… guess I’ll bid 15”) is so common, that experienced eBayers don’t all use the exact same strategy.

So anyhow, I’m pretty sold on low starting bids, since they encourage stupidity. If you know that people are going to find your auction and that most likely, more than two people are going to want your item, it’s hard to go wrong.

I also think that unless you make enough money that your time is wasted on ebaying small-ticket items, you should ebay your unwanted clothing. It’s a good way to make sure your stuff really finds new homes, it’s retardedly easy, and even small sales add up quickly. If you usually give your clothes to charity, why not sell them instead and send the profits to Darfur? Poor Americans have lots of secondhand clothes. And speaking of Darfur, yesterday I read an article about a wildlife preserve for (illegally) captive-raised big cats that had been abused or abandoned and couldn’t be released into the wild without assistance. So they opened this park that requires the active solicitation of donations to cover the $80K/month operating costs. I guess I was supposed to think this was great but… $80K a month??? Honestly, shoot every baby tiger in the face, there are things happening to humans that are too horrific to be mentioned on a site that tries to be family-friendly. So, if you’re trying to get into the holiday spirit, that’s the memorly.com endorsement. I’ll get off my soapbox now.