Now let me be clear. Ebay is generally fantastic and a wonderous place to pick up a bargain you would never normally come across (as my enormous Russian, American and British WW2 6mm armies will testify.
But sometimes it can provide you with almost physical pain when the following situations arise.
a) You see something you really want. No-one else seems interested and you sneak in a cheeky £0.99p bid. And one the day the auction is due to finish you're still there as the top bidder - and a great bargain is yours! You tuck into your Sunday lunch, come back and find some sod has nabbed it for £1.04 because you forgot to put a higher bid price on.
b) You follow the same procedure and enter your maximum bid of £0.99p. But the internet is a bit slow and clunky. You move on to other things and return to E-bay to find that the item you have bid for is now at £10.70. You laugh incredulously. What idiot would pay that for a few 6mm tanks? Then you realise the idiot is you. How? Because eBay has decided that your maximum bid is not 99p but £99! And some loon on the other side of the country has been bidding for this (probably a friend of the seller who has cottoned on to the scam) and has pushed the price up beyond all levels of reasoning. And its too late to withdraw the bid. And you are torn between getting a negative rating or coughing up 500% more for something than you otherwise would pay. Negative rating it is then.
c) You've seen an item you want. Lets say for arguments sake its a whopping collection of Royalist and Parliamentarian 6mm figures based for DBR. Its on at a cheap price...you up the bid...someone tops you and you top them. You're looking at £38 plus postage for both armies - then the wife sends you shopping. You come back and find a mini-bidding war has broken out and the price is just, just over what you'd think was a reasonable price (about 1/3 more than your bid). After all you could pay about the same for the army unpainted and do it yourself. But its a lot of time and effort. You are torn. Do you top the bid? Do you decide to forget it and build your own army? If only the bid was a few quid less. If only you knew that your next bid would secure it. If only....ah sod it. You click the close button and wonder forever more if you've made the right or wrong decision.
And wake up in the night thinking it was the wrong one.
(All of these may have happened to me a number of times except b) which happened today).
But sometimes it can provide you with almost physical pain when the following situations arise.
a) You see something you really want. No-one else seems interested and you sneak in a cheeky £0.99p bid. And one the day the auction is due to finish you're still there as the top bidder - and a great bargain is yours! You tuck into your Sunday lunch, come back and find some sod has nabbed it for £1.04 because you forgot to put a higher bid price on.
b) You follow the same procedure and enter your maximum bid of £0.99p. But the internet is a bit slow and clunky. You move on to other things and return to E-bay to find that the item you have bid for is now at £10.70. You laugh incredulously. What idiot would pay that for a few 6mm tanks? Then you realise the idiot is you. How? Because eBay has decided that your maximum bid is not 99p but £99! And some loon on the other side of the country has been bidding for this (probably a friend of the seller who has cottoned on to the scam) and has pushed the price up beyond all levels of reasoning. And its too late to withdraw the bid. And you are torn between getting a negative rating or coughing up 500% more for something than you otherwise would pay. Negative rating it is then.
c) You've seen an item you want. Lets say for arguments sake its a whopping collection of Royalist and Parliamentarian 6mm figures based for DBR. Its on at a cheap price...you up the bid...someone tops you and you top them. You're looking at £38 plus postage for both armies - then the wife sends you shopping. You come back and find a mini-bidding war has broken out and the price is just, just over what you'd think was a reasonable price (about 1/3 more than your bid). After all you could pay about the same for the army unpainted and do it yourself. But its a lot of time and effort. You are torn. Do you top the bid? Do you decide to forget it and build your own army? If only the bid was a few quid less. If only you knew that your next bid would secure it. If only....ah sod it. You click the close button and wonder forever more if you've made the right or wrong decision.
And wake up in the night thinking it was the wrong one.
(All of these may have happened to me a number of times except b) which happened today).