Well Joe like I said,bid your top dollar and don't forget
about the postage.

If you loose out the other guy paid to much,that's the
way I'd look at it.

...Tony...

Well Joe like I said,bid your top dollar and don't forget
about the postage.

If you loose out the other guy paid to much,that's the
way I'd look at it.

I don't understand???

If you bid what you are willing to pay,
how are you being beat out??

For me it is a matter of getting an item at the cheapest price, not necessarily winning. If I don't get it cheap this time, oh well, another will be by soon.

Robin: Dialup internet, right?

To Joe and Rick: When you've lost auctions by $.50, it's not necessarily that the winner beat you out with only a bid that was $.50 over your maximum bid.

Let's say you bid on a model for maximum bid of $22.50. You are currently the high bidder at $17 (because the person you've outbid placed his maximum bid at $16.50). You wait casually for the end of the auction, hoping for a $17 closing price. But at the last seconds, a sniper beats you out of the model and his winning bid is $23 -- the auction jumped from $17 to $23 within the final seconds and you lose by $.50 right? Not necessarily. If the sniper had bid $100 at the last seconds, he still would have won the model at $23, right? You (nor the seller) have no way of knowing his maximum bid -- what the sniper was really willing to pay for it. All you know is that it was above your $22.50. The fact that no one else sent in a bid approaching his $100 max bid makes it seem that he only bid low. If another person with sniping software had put in a bid of $51 in the final seconds, then Sniper #1 would have won the auction at $51.50 -- because his bid was pushed. He still would have won, but it would have cost him more dearly.

You may feel more satisfied that your $22.50 max mid jumped to $51.50 but regardless, it's unlikely that you only lost by a $23 bid. Remember, EVERY auction with more than one bidder will have the losing bidder lose by $.50 or $2.50 (or whatever the bidding increment is at that time).

To put it even more simply, imagine you see the same auction and someone has bid the opening bid of $10. You decide that you'll put in a max bid of $22.50. You do so and you take over the bidding at $17. Right away, you know that the previous high bidder's max bid was $16.50. You end up later winning the auction at $17 because he's done. Neither the first bidder nor the seller will ever know that your max bid was $22.50. In a sense, you BEAT the other bidder's $16.50 by $.50 but you were prepared to pay more than that. Make sense?

Like Robin said, just don't give in to emotions. The kit will come up again. And how are the last five models you've bought going? Finished them yet? LOL

My philosophy: let's build some more and bid less (unless it's for my auctions, of course! LOL)