Presenting my cel gallery!

trinitycubed · Post by **trinitycubed** » Sun Aug 02, 2009 1:14 pm

So I tired Yahoo JP for the first time last week, and everything went fine for this cheap cel that no one else wanted. So I decided to try my luck this morning for some very nice cels that were newly listed and ended today. What a difference it was! I woke up early, keeping track of what time the auction ended. Everything went fine as I wanted for the auction to come near an end. But then that whole extra time thing kicked in every time someone else put in a bit! I was having a serious anxiety attack waiting for the auction to end to see if I won and then have someone else bid and resetting the time! And since I wanted to bid on three of the auctions, I kept having to juggle the auction's end times since they were constantly changing! It was so confusing have to switch through multiple windows trying to see if the time was ending for an auction or if it had reset again and to see who the highest bidder currently was.

How do you guys do this? The auctions went on for another 40+ minutes! So I guess bidding on YJ just really comes down to how much you're willing to pay as it seems like it's impossible to snipe at the last minute!

teggacat · Post by **teggacat** » Sun Aug 02, 2009 2:44 pm

AAHHH the joys of cel collecting

kathpatty · Post by **kathpatty** » Sun Aug 02, 2009 4:28 pm

Post by **sensei** » Sun Aug 02, 2009 5:26 pm

trinitycubed wrote:How do you guys do this? The auctions went on for another 40+ minutes! So I guess bidding on YJ just really comes down to how much you're willing to pay as it seems like it's impossible to snipe at the last minute!

Sensei hates "nibblers" all over again

Mostly I bid my max just before going to bed and wake up a little before the auction I'm mostly interested in comes due, just in case it might be a good idea to guard against snipers from my DS. If it's going for more than I want to pay, then congratulations to the other person who thought it was worth more than that.

It's fun to watch people do dumb things at the end. I bid last week on a nice cel, and when I got up I saw that a Japanside bidder had topped my high bid. Fine, I said, and deleted the url from my "favorites," though not before I noticed that the bidder had bid ten times against my not-very-substantial bid.

Then the next day, the cel shows up FA on YJ from the Japanside winner! (Beginning price advanced 1000 yen above what s/he won it for, scan copied from the original seller's scan.) I can guess what happened: my bid was a quirky amount, and the nibbler was probably a shill bidder. (That is, someone who's interested only in seeing the lot go for one's maximum reserve bid.) S/he advanced probably 200 yen at a time, and the last bid accidentally topped my bid, and so the other contender inadvertently bought the cel!

I would not be surprised, since the seller is someone who works on commission for other collectors, if the other bidder was the person who actually was trying to sell said cel: by being less than cautious, s/he actually bought his/her own cel from the person s/he had commissioned to sell it! (Knowing that the seller is interminably slow about delivering goods, I can't think of how else the cel went back up for sale so quickly, unless it was already in the possession of the person who was the "lucky" winner.)

Now the lucky winner is hoping that maybe I overslept and really wanted it so much that I'm willing to bid 1000 yen more. Good luck!

It can really scramble your brain if you try to auction-sit more than two auctions at the end. Mostly I concentrate on one, often one that is getting less action than some other hotly-contested items from the same series on the same morning. Sometime you can sneak out of the eelgrass and nab a nice item while the sharks are going tooth and fin for two or three other lots.

So: did you win any?

trinitycubed · Post by **trinitycubed** » Sun Aug 02, 2009 5:58 pm

I actually won 2 out of the 3 that I was going for!

The first one I was going for fell through as another bidder kept outbidding me and I wanted to save my money for another one of the cels. I won the one I really wanted and then tried my luck for another cel and it went through as well!

And then I saw the handling fees and had another heart attack...

cutiebunny · Post by **cutiebunny** » Sun Aug 02, 2009 11:01 pm

Forty additional minutes is quite a long time, especially for YJ. I've bid on auctions that have extended an additional 10-20 minutes, but 40 is quite a long time. However, that's a normal extension on Mandarake. It's not uncommon to see an auction extend for an additional hour there.

I would think that eventually, someone would get tired and call it quits. I know I would.

But, I'm glad to hear that you won the two auctions that you wanted, Trinity.