Comment by dmurray
8 hours ago
Maybe eBay should publish the price the winning bidder actually bid.
This would let people stop thinking "I lost by one cent" in that situation. It also has a marketing benefit: look at all these people who got great bargains relative to what they would have paid. And it's not an unreasonable amount of transparency: in second price auctions e.g. for stamps or electricity, it's normal to publish the details of all the bids.
Of course eBay has already thought about this more deeply than me and perhaps trialled it and decided they didn't like it. Maybe it's off-putting to sellers to see they lost something for $10 to a buyer who would have paid $30?
The only way to win by a cent is to put your bid at that.
If the current price is $5 and your max bid is $30 and I put a max bid of $100, it will make the current price $31 - $35, whatever the increment is.
To get ebay to accept a bid of one cent over, you have to explicitly set that. Let's say, I'd actually pay $30 as well. $30.01 isn't materially different. So if I put in $30.01, my bid becomes higher than yours.