Now quite OT: Re: ePay

From: Aaron Christopher Finney <aaron_at_wfi-inc.com>
Date: Mon Oct 26 13:05:24 1998

> I would prefere the last one, because it would reflect the
> idea of proxy bidding - bid once and let the eBay do its job.

I personally *hate* the proxy bid idea. At least how it works on eBay.
There's not many things as demoralizing than seeing something nifty with a
bid of $2.00 on it and someone has put a maximum bid of $50.00 on it. The
whole fun of an incremental auction is the small jumps in bidding and that
soul-searching question you have to ask yourself each time you're outbid:
"Do I really want to go a buck higher on that [insert item here]?"

If there's going to be a "maximum" bid, then it should just be a
sealed-bid auction, where everyone secretly bids whatever they want to pay
and the highest wins, with no bid amounts being disclosed. Unfortunately,
if there's something you really want, you have to play by the rules and
suffer through it. I try not to "snipe" anyone...it's a karma thing. But I
do usually hold my bidding until within a couple of hours before the end
of the auction. If the person I outbid in turn outbids me immediately, I
take it as a sign that they really want the item and most of the time I'll
move along to something else.

What I'd love to see is a live auction site, where the auctions for each
item don't last more than 10 minutes or so. Descriptions/pictures for the
items could be on a separate server a week in advance (like the preview
for a real auction) and an item catalog that people could print out. Then
the auctions would take place, say, once or at most twice per week in
each category. A real-time auction applet (unfortunately excluding the
lynx/shell crowd) could then be used to broadcast the current bid and to
"raise your paddle" as well. Only one integer broadcasted by the host for
the current bid amount, one for the item number, one to indicate the
current "round" number, and one sent from the user to raise the bidding
paddle. Users could have previously logged in with their username and
password and given their paddle and bidder number. Much faster than fifty
people hitting reload on a large HTML page filled with graphics, what with
only three bytes out and one byte in! The result? A smooth, fast auction
where everyone has the chance to bid to their hearts content.

Aaron
Received on Mon Oct 26 1998 - 13:05:24 GMT