I semi-regularly bid on K&L auctions and have recently noticed that people seem to be using bots to automatically bid. I have placed bids on wines days before the auction end date and even before the page has reloaded it tells me I have been outbid. If I bid again the same thing happens. This suggests to me that folks are using bots to bid. I hadn’t noticed this previously on K&L auctions, but perhaps I was just lucky previously. I understand why merchants wouldn’t mind it (hammer prices go up), but it’s a big turn off as a bidder.
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Similar to eBay, you can set a max bit on KL. It automatically beats any bid under your max.
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or their default high bid was higher than all your bids. So everytime you bid, their high bid was higher so it went up one increment. Then you bid again and their high bid was still higher so it went up another increment.
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Pretty standard feature in online wine auctions
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I see. I guess I hadn’t noticed that feature. Fair enough I guess, although how does that work as the auction expires? What happens if two people have the same max bid?
1st bidder wins it
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Interesting. Thanks for the explanation.
you wouldn’t be able to have the same max bid.
If my max bid was $200. The current bid was $75.
You then at the last second try to bid $200, it wouldn’t be possible cause I’ve already bid $200
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Haven’t seen this in years.
NP. That’s part of the advantage of setting a max bid. The downside is that it can cause the price to go high.
That only happens when there’s two people willing to pay a high price, which is the same with any auction. The only advantage to watching and not bidding is hoping people forget about it and you can snipe it for cheap.
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Yes, also if there’s no action on a lot, ppl who may not know about the wine will skip it because there’s no obvious interest. Sometimes ppl bid bc they see other ppl going in – this particularly applies to WineBid, where multiple bidders can split the lot
Yes, K&L, and many online auction websites use a slightly modified Vickery Auction where the bid that’s “sealed” is the current highest bid.
In theory the dominant strategy is to bid your true valuation for the wine. But I do think it’s probably true that early bids act as signals to other buyers to pay attention to particular lots. This could be expected to increase the final hammer price, since you are increasing the number of people you are bidding against, especially when there are hundreds of lots in auction and attention is spread thin.
I think the best option is to bid your true value (your highest willingness to pay) very near to auction closing (<30 mins). But that’s also a bit of a pain!
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There’s also occasionally some strange bidding going down on Idealwine. Not enough that I’d call it a systematic issue, but still…
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If I “lose” an auction, it’s because someone bid a higher amount than my max bid before the deadline. I don’t care whether they did it on Thursday or had a bot do it .01 seconds before the deadline.
If seeing the bot bid would have caused me to bid higher, I should have just set my max bid at that higher number in the first place.
Lastly, when I “lose,” it’s really fine. Often just as well I had my fun discovering the bottle but didn’t spend more money or add to my overfull cellar.
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In what way?
I’m not sure it’s as prevalent for established Burgundy and BDX names as for VdF. I sometimes see one user setting a max bid to an amount three times the estimates, while no other bidders challenge, but the estimate moves higher for the next auctions— either it’s a flaw or a way to increase estimates and general ‘hype’ for a product.
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Similarly, I find myself wondering to what extent houses use other data leaked by bidders, such as watches/tracks and search traffic, to gauge interest and adjust minima.
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I don’t believe this is true.
If the current bid is $70, with a $5 increment, and you bid $200, it would show you (to the public) as the high bidder at $75.
If that situation went unchanged and I then tried to bid $200 at the last minute, it would NOT reject my bid. Rather, it would accept my bid at $200, but declare you the winner at $200, given that you bid that amount before I did. Of course, if either of us had bid $201, we would win at $201.
At least that’s how I believe it works. The only bid it will reject is one that does not meet the bid increment above the currently revealed high bid.
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Think Charlie meant what you’re saying, not that it would be “rejected”, simply that you would not win.
In your example, if I had a max logged of 200 with a 5 minimum increment, my 200 should still win even if you bid 201 at the end.
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