eMoviePoster.com

When eBay got going in the late 1990s, they added a new feature that had never been seen before in auctions, one that could only work with computers and online auctions, which is that all their auctions had fixed end times, meaning that at an exact time, bidding came to a halt, and the highest bid placed to that time won the auction!

This worked great for a while, until people invented ways to bid through computers with seconds to go ("sniping") and that meant many bidders were "shut out" by these final second bids, where they WOULD have been willing to pay more, but "time had run out". When we started our own auction site in 2007, we saw that not only were many bidders frustrated by losing items to these "snipers", but it also meant that consignors were losing money, because their items were selling for lower than they would have had the losing bidders had a chance to bid again, so we added "time-extended" auctions to our site (where NO auction ended until five minutes went by without a bid, so that NO bidder could have an item "snatched away" from them by a last second bid).

Because we were the VERY FIRST online auction site to use time-extended auctions, many bidders had trouble adapting to this "change", but actually we were merely returning auctions to how they had been held for hundreds of years before eBay came along! A few dozen disgruntled bidders made loud public pronouncements that they would NEVER bid in time-extended auctions, but over time, ALL of them came to accept them and probably almost all bidders now see their advantages.

Why are time-extended auctions better than fixed time ("eBay style") auctions? In all fixed time auctions all but the last few seconds is a "preview period" and the real bids usually come in only in the final seconds. My opinion is that if everyone understood that "all but the last few seconds is a preview period" then NO ONE would ever bid before those final seconds, and EVERY auction would have ZERO bids until it closes, and then it WOULD be "blind bidding", where you would get ONE chance to place a bid, without having the slightest clue what anyone else is bidding. I feel certain that the only reason some people like the eBay style auctions is because many uninformed people bid early, and they can swoop in and snatch items at lower prices at the last second.

And therefore if there were no early bidding at all, then EVERYONE would hate eBay style fixed end times auctions. While the occasional extra time (which happens on a relatively small percentage of auctions, and most of those are simply extended by five minutes or less) CAN be annoying, it is not more annoying than when you go to any "live auction" and two bidders take a long time bidding back and forth.

It is very interesting to note that one by one the other online auctions have been following our lead and switching to time-extended auctions. One of the last holdouts finally made the switch, but in a VERY odd way. Auctions still run one after the other, so that when one is extended, it extends ALL the auctions after it! To me, that makes no sense at all, because it can be very inconvenient to those waiting to bid on other items. In our auctions, all the auctions are separate, so that when one is extended it has no effect on the others.

What is also very interesting is to note that there have been no protests when other auctions followed us and switched to time-extended auctions. Collectors know how successful this has been for us (for both bidders AND consignors) and they no longer see it as something "new". This just shows how it can be harder to be an innovator in a business, rather than a follower, but we don't mind, because we have been leading this hobby for 24 years, first with major auctions in 1990, the first major auctioneer to embrace the Internet in 1999, then the first with weekly auctions in 2002, and on and on!

See Also:
Did you know... that our auctions have proxy bids (or "limit bids") PLUS time-extended bidding and how that works?
Did You Know that our auctions have "time extended bidding"?