Auctions pulled from Yahoo Japan?

[Kasi]

Hello.

I'm a tad frustrated recently as I collect from a series where cel auctions are few and far between, and have been for some years now. Because it's a niche series, I wouldn't say they're overly pricey cels, but there is certainly demand with so little for sale, bidding wars can escalate.

Now some cels by different sellers have popped up in the past weeks, and nearly half of the auctions have been canceled early (roughly 5 by two different sellers). All of these auctions had bids, but all were pulled within 24 hours, frustrating! The first time it happened I assume someone made the seller a private offer and they accepted. The last two by a different seller were canceled when there was already plenty of bidding going on, one item had 3 bidders and was at 13000 yen (which is already at the high end of this series value but not close to where I guess this cel would have been bidded up to), and the other 1 bid at 20000 yen (4 cels together). It was pretty obvious the auctions were hot, so I really don't understand why the seller would accept if they were offered a private bid? I'm also surprised the seller was able to delete all the bids and close the auctions. Are there any penalties on Yahoo Japan for that?

Does this happen to anyone else, or is it rather common? Obviously it's really getting to me! Even if I place a bid early there's no guarantee the auction will run :/ If it's a particular buyer making private offers they're really getting the best of it.

[darksuzaku]

Don't know if it happens often or not but reminds me of what happened to me a few years ago.

One seller placed for auction 4 cels from a series i collect. Each had their own auction. 3 of the cels were nice and the 4th was so-so. Placed early bids on all 4. In fact i only really wanted the 3 nice ones but given that i was pretty sure to win i decided to bid on the so-so one too to complete the lot make things easier for the seller.

The next day when i went to check how the auctions were going i realized that the seller had pulled the 3 auctions for the nice cels and only the one for the so-so one was left. Saying that i felt extremely pissed at the seller would not be enough, but the only thing i could do was reduce my early bid to the minimum hoping that someone would outbid me (you can't retract bids on YJ, or at least it wasn't possible at the time). But nobody else placed bids and i got stuck with it. In myopinion, if the seller had a legitimate excuse to pull only 3 of the auctions, seeing that i was the only bidder on all 4 he should have at least cancelled my bid on the 4th one so i could have the chance to decide if i still wanted it or not. By not doing so, this seller had played dirty.

But lesson learned. I have never again placed early bids on more than 1 auction at the same time from the same seller. I don't ussually place early bids anyway (fortunately for me my europe timezone allows me to babysit japanese usual auction ending times).

[Kasi]

That sounds just as frustrating Darksuzaku! I'd be livid too. I should actually keep that in mind since I do tend to place bids early.

Thankfully though another collector shed some light on why they second auctions I mentioned were canceled. The seller wasn't sure of the items location in storage apparently and so pulled the auctions to give time to search for them. Hopefully they will turn up again *phew*.

[Quacker]

In some instances I have known Private Collectors to deliberately post-up week-long auctions for a selection of their Cels, with a starting price of 1 or 100 Yen (to attract potential bidders), only to close/cancel them all after 3/4days, no matter the amount of bids or auction-value.

The aim of this exercise is gauge the current 'market' for their Cels/Collection in order to place a monetary-value on a particular Cel or series.

[Keropi]

I've had YJ auctions cancelled before and it was pretty annoying to me. I think for at least several of them the seller was just happy to get what they got. They wanted the money quickly so they ended the auction(s) early. The starting bids were not set low so I think the seller already got the minimum they wanted. For a couple of the auctions, the bidding had already gone decently high so they just ended the auction. Maybe they got offered more for it off the table I don't know. All I know is that the auction ended and I didn't get to bid my full amount on it.