analyzing diablo 3 auctions

I sell on eBay for a living and a lot of the mechanics about eBay that the article talks about are true but the conclusions the author draws are totally incorrect.

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The sniping strategy eBay buyers used in the past has been obsolete ever since proxy bidding, eBay's automatic bidding system, was implemented by eBay in 2007. On eBay, when you see an auction you would like to bid on, you enter your max bid, not the next incremental bid. eBay will then bid for you on the auction automatically whenever another buyer tries to outbid you. This completely eliminates the advantage buyers had when they attempted to snipe an auction right before it ended.

For example, you want to buy an iPad and the most you will spend is $200. You see an iPad being auctioned off. The current bid is $5. You know you are willing to spend at most $200 on the iPad. So instead of bidding $6 to beat the current highest bidder, you bid $200. If the current highest bidder didn't place a max bid of more than $5, your bid will now become the highest bid at $6. From now on, every time another buyer tries to bid on the iPad, you will automatically outbid them up to a bid of $200.

The only advantage sniping offered was to allow you to make a bid at the last possible second so that no other buyers could place a higher bid than your bid, thus allowing you to win the auction at a low price even though other buyers would have been willing to pay more to win the auction. Proxy bidding renders this completely useless since eBay will just automatically outbid the sniper so long as the max bid of the current high bidder is higher than that of the sniper's.

You can read more about it here http://pages.ebay.com/help/buy/automatic-bidding.html

Automatic bidding is very common on marketplaces that offer auctions. It ensures that the auctions sell for a higher price and thus allows the marketplace to take a higher commission off the final sale. I would be surprised if Blizzard did not implement this for Diablo 3.

The reason prices increase the most towards the end of an auction is due to how eBay's search engine algorithm works. In short, your auction gets the most exposure in eBay's search engine in the last 30 minutes - 24 hours (varies depending on a lot of factors). More exposure equals more buyers willing to bid on it.

The "the longer the auction, the higher the prices" conclusion is correct in terms of statistics but does not work the way your article suggests. Longer auctions work well for items that are uncommon and not searched for very often on eBay. Auction durations have very little effect on items that are sold heavily on eBay. If you are selling something such as an antique, signed memorabilia, custom tools, designer bags & clothing or anything that isn't mass produced, then yes, it is better to have a longer duration for your auction. This is because longer durations will result in more exposure for these kinds of items. If you have your auction up for 10 days instead of 3, chances are more interested buyers will be get a chance to see your product. Not all eBay buyers interested in purchasing your antique will be on eBay everyday looking to buy one, so by increasing your auction's duration you increase the chance that one of these buyers will happen to go onto eBay and bid on your antique.

However, this is not true of mass produced items. If you are trying to sell a 4 GB flash drive, your auction's duration has almost no effect on your final sale price. This is because there are thousands of 4 GB flash drives being sold on eBay; there are more flash drives being sold than there are buyers for them. The search engine is flooded with mass produced goods, so even if you list your auction for 10 days, no one will ever see it, and even if they do there will be hundreds of others that are identical to it. No one will bid on an auction that is ending in ten days when there are so many of the same auction ending within the next hour.

For auctions based on items found in a game, this applies even more because every product will be exactly the same. At least with 4 GB flash drives, there are some variations such as the brand, color, style, etc. For Diablo, when you sell a 100 armor helmet, it will be exactly the same as the 100 armor helmet everyone else is trying to sell. No one will bid on a 100 armor helmet ending in ten days when there are plenty ending today.

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Yeah, longer auction durations for rarer drops will definitely be preferable to shorter ones but in terms of sniping, as long as some sort of automatic bidding system is set up sniping will still not work. It's true that people would like to avoid bidding wars on higher priced and rare items so they might not input their max bid at the start of an auction. But when an auction is about to end and you're trying to snipe the item, you would still want to put in your max bid because the current bidder might already have a max bid that's higher than your next incremental bid and you don't want the auction to end before you get a chance to make another bid. Also, you are at risk of other snipers waiting for the auction to come to a close, so it is always beneficial to enter your max bid by the end of the auction. This will cause the item to be sold at more or less the same price as when the buyers entered their max bid at the beginning of the auction.

iPad current bid at $5 - current high bidder has max bid at $50
Auction about to end
Sniper 1 willing to pay $150
Sniper 2 willing to pay $170
Sniper 3 willing to pay $190

It is beneficial for all snipers to input their max bid because they do not know what the current high bidder's max bid is and they don't know if other snipers are watching the item. In the end Sniper 3 will win the iPad at $171. If all bidders inputted their max bid at the beginning of the auction, the final sale price would still be $171. It's true that some buyers still tend to wait towards the end of an auction to place a bid, but again, the main reason for this is because auctions will always get more exposure during the last 24 hours of it's life. The people placing bids at the last minute are not snipers, they are buyers who happened to just come across the auction right before it ends because it is now ranked higher in the search engine. Buyers almost always put their max bid in when they first come across an auction they intend to bid on. The exceptions are usually ones who do not know about the proxy bidding feature.

Even before proxy bidding was implemented, sniping was a dying strategy because there were tons of 3rd party software that allowed you to automate your snipe, which, in essence, was just a way to implement proxy bidding unofficially outside of eBay. You would pick an auction you were bidding on, input the max bid, and have the software bid for you up to that amount when the auction was about to end. These programs were really widespread and a lot of people used them, so the advantage snipers had diminished greatly over the years as these programs gained more and more popularity.

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I'll be honest with you. If i accidentally clicked on your website from some google search I would instantly click the back button. The background is really ugly, the subscribe button on the right is internally associated with spam/scam emails and shit, and the "easy navigation" reminds me of those really shady websites. Just my opinion but I think it needs a lot of work.

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On May 02 2012 15:06 2c0ntent wrote: hopefully I can improve it over time, just rly isn't that easy to see where to take it from here

He is laying down some hard truths, but he is right, the site structure as it stands just... isn't very good. Its not smooth or pleasant to look at. Its not easy to navigate.
The site structure really needs deleting and a quality website put in its place. If you want anyone to visit that is.
Content is pretty good imo, even if it gets owned by jason sometimes Maybe you could write articles for one of the bigger D3 websites instead of trying to make your own, because it requires a huge amount of effort to make a half-way decent website, as I am sure you see.
Would definately be good experience to bring the site up to the modern standard, something on par with your competition. There must be recources out there for learning how, and building blocks that people are using to build the slick websites of today. Idk, man, I do hope it works out for you.

Lol, I feel like marge at the end of this simpsons scene

Since you seem to be ambitious towards your project I'll be honest, as I believe it might help in the long run.

The page design is rather bad.


I'd recommend just setting up a wordpress page and using a pre-built template.
There you can choose a nice template, link it to your url and eventually run a great website!


Good luck!

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dont have any input but for what its worth i like your idea and think its possible

gl :o

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