please explain Heritage Auctions to me

[cmixer]

A small lot of sketch cards was posted on Heritage.
I created an account just for this item/lot.
I followed for days or weeks and had the highest bid.
It was supposed to end tonight, but I just got an email that the item/lot was withdrawn.

Are you telling me that a seller can withdraw an item if they don't like the current price?

[Grid]

Originally Posted by cmixer

A small lot of sketch cards was posted on Heritage.
I created an account just for this item/lot.
I followed for days or weeks and had the highest bid.
It was supposed to end tonight, but I just got an email that the item/lot was withdrawn.

Are you telling me that a seller can withdraw an item if they don't like the current price?

Yup. Though its typically not as transparent as that. With most of these auction houses, you are bidding against a secret reserve in some cases. If the seller has no clout with that auction house. The item gets "sold" back to them if a reserve is in place. That way the auction house still gets paid.

Example, your lot is worth $5K. The seller says he wont sell for under $3K. You bid $2750, the next bid goes to the seller for $3K. Private reserve now met, any bid over $3K is legit and the auction house stops bidding on behalf of the seller.

No other bids come, and the seller wins their own lot and has to pay the buyer premium, typically 20-25%, to the auction house. So they lose. And that is why most listings dont have a reserve.

If the seller has a big shot with that auction house, and he sends them a lot or he buys a lot. They might agree to just pull the listing if its performing badly. Which seems to be what happened to you.

[Rictor]

A seller can end an Ebay auction at any time before it ends, so I don't see why they couldn't do it on other platforms. I have this happen to me all the time on Ebay.

Heck, even on auctions I win, if the price isn't what they wanted, the seller suddenly "loses" the item and can't ship it it, so I get a refund, then it magically gets relisted at a higher price a week later.

[eldavojohn]

Originally Posted by Rictor

A seller can end an Ebay auction at any time before it ends, so I don't see why they couldn't do it on other platforms. I have this happen to me all the time on Ebay.

Heck, even on auctions I win, if the price isn't what they wanted, the seller suddenly "loses" the item and can't ship it it, so I get a refund, then it magically gets relisted at a higher price a week later.

If you do this on ebay more than a few times an "evaluation period" they start to charge you something like 10% of the bid you canceled. At least that was how they used defeat shill bidding -- not sure if they fixed this. You can still get around it by having a ton of auctions as it works out to some percentage of your total successfully sold items IIRC.

[DynaEtch]

Thats a total bummer. I will say that is quite rare and does not usually happen on Heritage…but I guess it can apparently. I haven’t seen this personally on items Ive bid on so far.

[dd316]

Sorry, I found it funny there's a Heritage banner ad at the top of the page. I assume Chris won't be clicking on it.