It means nothing and is silly IMO. It is not contractually binding, people can bid whatever they want and I guess the idea is that a seller can fish for an offer they think is good enough to contact a potential buyer and start negotiations?

The 'bidding' is not really a very good term for what is happening with it. One thing I don't like about the new market revision.

Not a fan either. I won't be participating.

People can get in trouble and banned for abusing the bidding process though. How does that work? If you are a buyer or seller who is pulling shenanigans you will get called out sooner or later.

I agree, I do not know why we need a "bidding" process. PM the person and make an offer and go from there. I would not be interested if a seller told me to go bid on a pin if I want it.

Have you see the "feedback and recommendation" part of the My Pinside info? That is interesting also.

Yep same here I thought that was what FLea Bay was for....

Hold up, people...
I can think of two different "use cases" when selling a pin (you are in either category 1 or 2 below):

1. Must sell ASAP (timing issue: space/money) that puts pressure on the seller.
2. Don't need to sell, will only sell for the $ I put into it (that means a reserve must be met), no timing issue.

I don't see where "taking bids" falls into either category 1 or 2.

I think 1 is handled with "Price $X obo" -- Seller sells to first in line to get exchange over with.
I think 2 is handled with "Make Offer" -- If reserve is never met, no sale is ever executed.

For what case does bidding satisfy a typical "seller use case"? I think that use case should be left to ebay, as stated there are too many "gotchyas" with bidding that involve: timing, backing out, it's too sticky of a situation to navigate here...

Can you think of another seller use case?
Can you think of a use case where bidding makes sense on Pinside?

not me.
ebay keeps it anonymous (unless you win) for good reason. Nobody likes to lose a bidding war.
-mof

I think the bidding option makes a lot of sense. Both for the seller as well as for the buyer.

Let's say you are selling a game but don't know what kind of price to list your game for. Simply list it with the bidding option and see what kind of offers you get. When you see an offer you like, contact that Pinsider and make a deal.

For the buyer it's also an easy tool. Instead of having to type a PM and all the hassle, you can simply place your bid. You could place bids on several ads and see if any seller bites. It's a quick way to show interest in a game. Seller will react if your bid is good enough (or maybe even PM you a counter-offer). Bids are public which gives others an idea what a game goes for (public benefit) and it's very accessible and takes almost no time.

A similar system runs on the biggest Dutch classifieds site Marktplaats.nl and I think it works fairly well. I did make some changes to their concept, mainly that you can bid anything you like, it doesn't have to be higher than the highest bid. Thought is that seller might actually prefer selling a a lower price if buyer livers nearby, has a good rep etc. And also that bidding on an ad can not be killed if some funny guy makes a $100,000 bid.

Making bids public was a conscious decision. We realise that we can not make bids legally binding, so that's not the intent of the system. We do want to try and minimise abuse and fake bids and such and therefore showing the bidders username makes perfect sense. This is not Ebay, Pinside is not in the middle of the transaction and therefore we cannot make bids binding.

I agree that bidding is not the right term. It should have been named "make an offer".

You don't have to like the concept of bidding on ads, but at least here's some perspective on why I built it.

Robin,

I think it is ripe for abuse and people manipulating to change perceptions.

I put up a game, and then my anonymous friends, put in some middle high bid to already make a noob perceive the game to be a decent deal or increase hype.

I think you are also going to see many more people just fishing for a high sale with tons of adds. I could now list my entire collection with no real recourse even when I don't intend to sell anything unless some person comes along with a crazy bid.

You can have people trolling sellers with anonymous accounts and 'bidding' high to just detract others that are genuinely interested from tossing out a real offers.

Anyone selling a pinball machine on pinside should have a reasonable idea of what the game is worth and be able to set a price. This creates a better selling environment as it provides a clear and honest selling/starting point.

The idea of the new feature is nice, but in reality it is ripe for issues.

How do you fix it? I am not sure, but I would like to see every FS ad have a set price. If they want to take OBO then they can do so via pm instead of where it can be manipulated by others.

Okay, fair points. We'll keep an eye out and see how it goes. Bidding is only a small part of the recent marketplace update. I'm not as worried. If we're indeed seeing it negatively impacting the Pinside community than I won't hesitate to remove the feature. But let's give it a try, okay?

By the way, people will not be able to make low bids if you set a proper minimum bid amount.

I do think you were right that "bid" is not the right term. I'm gonna see how much work it would be to rename it to "make offer".

Okay it turns out it was only 5 minutes of work. I have renamed the term "bid" to "make offer", where applicable. I think this much better describes the intent of this feature: a low-barrier way of expressing interest in a for sale item.

This is good for a buyer that is busy and doesn't want the hassle of spending one minute to do a PM, who absolutely has no questions about the condition of a game, the game will be shipped buy the seller, who wants everyone else on Pinside to know what he or she just offered for the game so others can strategize their negotiations against him and likes to make non binding bids that can have non binding acceptance by sellers on a fake auction with no ending timeline set and no timeline of acceptance or denial of the bid by the seller.

If you are this buyer - go for it! For all the others who have bought a pin before there is always back and forth on condition, price, pickup and delivery arrangements, so do a PM. You are going to have to sooner or later anyway.

Are people going to give bad feedback on someone for backing out of a "bid" or a seller accepting a bid and changing his mind?

Marktplaats.nl is Owned by Ebay. Ebay can be a good place to sell smaller, lower priced items, but can be horrible for pinball machines. We are a small pond and messaging each other, communicating and meeting each other is a good thing. If there were a million of us, yes bidding may work, but we are just not that large of a group. Most of us will be here for a long time and we all love and enjoy pinball. Most of us are not just cleaning out a closet and selling a few random things on Pinside then walking away, so if you do that, go with EBay, but that is not necessary here. I have benefited greatly from messaging and PMing and have become friends with the sellers I have bought all my games from over the years.

This may be good for some, but not me for the above reasons.

Edit- "make offer is better than bid" thanks!

Very good, so you agree with my use case #2 in my post above. I only see 2 use cases:

1. Seller need: This price, OBO (I need cash or space, ASAP)
2. Buyer need: Make offer (I don't need to sell, fishing for eager buyers since I'm "willing" to let it go)

Do you see any other use cases? Or just these two.

Yeah, so if you change your "make bid" to "make offer" I'm very happy with that... I can really see "make offer" working for a guy with a large group of pins to sell that are not in a hurry to sell. Just to see if anyone out there is fishing for one in the group, rather than having to make 10 separate "for sale" ads. Is this ok under your new system?

-mof