Hope everyone’s been doing well 
I just noticed that we are now unable to check bids placed on PWCC auctions on eBay, for Pokemon cards at least. It’s coming up as "private listing - bidders’ identities protected’’. I’ve usually avoided these types of auctions in the past, does anyone have any thoughts on this?
Happy Collecting!
lol if you thought people complained about shill bidding before… just wait til you see this lot!
If I recall correctly they literally had to retract a bunch of shills on their last 9.5 bgs 1st ed base that was one higher subgrade away from a 10. Haven’t followed a pwcc auction since then so dunno about any other more recent cards/auctions. Not sure if they were alerted or so many people messaged them. I don’t get their move here…
My guess is they got hundreds of messages saying this auction or that auction is being shill bid. By doing this none of us except PWCC can see the buyers feedback and with that they alone will determine if an auction is being shilled without the hundreds of additional messages. Whether its the right move or not that’s up for debate but that’s why they did that
So how are we supposed to do this now? 
I think people are being too small minded about this. It’s on all of their new listings sports, MTG, Yugioh, etc. It’s not just a pokemon thing. PWCC made the decision, the reason for that decision could be multiple things. I highly doubt it was just because of the Pokemon community though.
I am no “expert” at shill bidding. But the below sure looks funny to me on a PWCC ebay auction.
8 days left on auction.
I never understood anyone bidding at any point before a few seconds left. When I actually want to win something I never bid till the very last few seconds. Call me crazy, I’m old school I guess lol
Pokémon collectors hate this one simple trick!
@rickybobby why do bids on an auction look funny?
A lot of times I’ll throw down low bids on items that I’ll sit down later and figure out my max bid on essentially to just enable alerts and remind myself. I have 50+ bids on various PWCC items. There are thousands of people or more who closely follow their auctions and likely more like me.
I can’t imagine the amount of messages PWCC used to get from bid detectives and I doubt it’ll get any better.
I imagine some people are bidding on more than one auction and can’t snipe all of them at the end, so they just put their max in on some auctions they don’t care about losing and which ever ones stick are just a bonus. This seems like the most probable cause with PWCC auctions since they list hundreds that end within seconds of each other…
I always thought it would motivate early bidding if buyers could not see how much time was left on auctions. All buyers would have to bid their max at that time or risk missing out.
This makes sense. I was bidding 2 nights ago on a PSA 10 Kingdra and I swear, I put in a max bid $30 over the current maximum and then somebody bids literately $1 more than me on first try. There was no attempt in the bidding record of slowly trying to increase. They bid $1 ahead of me 10 minutes and I find their telekinesis power too good. Is their shill bidder an Alakazam?
The increments and timing of each bid.
Also the fact that is beyond the highest I ever seen for that card and still had 8 days left. They have 3? Of the same card up for auction at the same time, all with 7 days left. All are 700-1k above the last few sales in the past 2 weeks.
It may not be shill bidding. However not being able to see ebay rating puts more, not less doubt in many people’s minds.
I also do this. You get more consistent notifications if you actually place a bid on an item, which is super useful with so many auctions happening at once.
That’s not how bidding works. Let’s say your max bid was $50 and you input that on ebay and are now winning the auction at $50. I come along and set a max bid of $75, but the current auction bid will only be $51 because nobody is competing with my max bid of $75 to push the price up any higher. If you went in and increased your max bid to $60 then I’d still be winning at $61. Then if you made your max bid $100, you would be winning at a price of $76. ebay only makes you bid the lowest amount possible to be the winning bid as long as your max bid is the highest.
Been in this hobby forever, and shill bidding is just something I’ve never worried about.