There are 3 types of auctions...
1.Rigged or Shill Bid Auctions, where you get a mate to bid up the price and risk buying your own thing back, in Ebay and real world auctions, this is rife...Every Auction room has some form of this....Since the advent of the hidden over a £100 pound rule, the sellers are free to do this.....negates the point of an auction if you ask me.
2.High Start Price or (1) auctions, these are to push up the market value of a particular commodity, if you have a 100 or so of an item, you need to get the price level you want, since most history information is around a month, it means that you can in successive auctions *mug* the punters as they think they are getting a bargin.
3. Genuine Auctions, these are becoming far between these days....as ebay automated buy/sell software becomes more common, these are snipped and often re-marketed straight away for a quick profit. There are instances on Ebay where a computer is selling to a computer that is selling to a computer especially in the more straight forward commodity areas of ebay, i.e memory, mobile phones, games...etc with little or no human interaction.
Especially with the suprising move remove the sellers need to comment, its more likely the software will be just buying and selling by itself with a working cashflow and pricing tables and + - targets to work with.
Sooner or later Ebay will allow buyers to hold stock of things that have been bought (while the resell) at the original sellers warehouse, then truly Ebay will just become a trading floor with commodity brokers.
Sad but inevitable.
