apocalypse_now Posted:

That I understood, but I don’t get it why people use the lowest possible start bid price. Just to save the reserve money? That’s a bit lame since they don’t want their stuff sold cheap and make a lot of fleez from it. I lost auctions with way past 1 mil. that started at less than 50.000 .

A high starting bid will ensure your item sells for that amount, if anyone bids at all, but it comes with the risk of losing your higher deposit.

If you set the starting bid low, then your deposit is correspondingly low, so you don’t stand to lose too much if the auction fails. But you don’t want it to actually sell that cheaply, so you put in a reserve, which is a riskier way of “guaranteeing” a higher sale price, because no-one can see the reserve, so they don’t know what value you’re aiming for with your auction.

Then you can post in the Kyoubai forum and tell people what the reserve is, which either puts them off bidding at all (if it’s too high) or negates the downside of no-one knowing what the reserve is (if anyone bothers to read your auction post that is).

Also if you know the item is worth a lot, and likely to sell for a lot no matter what you do because multiple people will put in high bids, then why bother with a high starting bid? It’ll get bid up past the highest allowed starting bid anyway, and you won’t have to put down so much deposit. Just set a reserve in case the auction is an abject failure and await payment.

‘kay?