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During the online auction process, there are a number of things you should be on the lookout for, to help prevent you paying over the odds for your selected auction lots. Shill bidding is one such factor. It is something that the online auction industry is very secretive about. They are so secretive about it in fact, that they have done a particularly good job at covering the whole issue up. I say that they have done a good job of covering it up, purely for the fact that many people within the online bidding sector - especially leisure shoppers - have actually never heard of the process of shill bidding. And when you find out what exactly shill bidding is and the processes involved in it, you will understand more about exactly why the online auction houses are so keen to cover it up. The art of shill bidding is a highly effective collaboration between the online auction websites themselves and third party individual or organisation. The auction website will employ a third party to act as a legitimate potential buyer throughout the bidding process. The shill - sometimes known more commonly as a stooge or plant - will take on the role of a regular bidder. All other potential buyers within the bidding process will be none the wiser to the addition of a shill bidder. So what is in it for the online auction companies, and why would they pay someone to act as a bidder on their behalf? Well, that's a good question. And to answer it we must first look a little more closely at the online bidding process and the steps involved within it. In the traditional form of auction, be that an online one or a physical "real world" auction, interested parties take it in turns to place their bids at increasing incremental values. This practice works fine in real world auctions because all interested parties are in the room at the time, and they know that the time to bid is there and then. In the online world however, this process does tend to throw up a few problems. Chief among which is that online auction websites want to make sure that they have given potential bidders adequate enough time to find the lot within the auction that they are interested in, and place a bid on it. Because the internet is live 24 hours a day 7 days a week, and accessible from anywhere in the world it is not really feasible for websites to tell everyone who may be interested in taking part in a particular auction to be online at a certain time. This means that auction websites have to place auctions live over a certain time period. Once that time period is over, the auction finishes and the highest bidder at the time the auction closes is the winner. For this reason, a common tactic among interested parties is to wait until the last possible moments of an auction before placing their bid. And shill bidders are the auction companies' response to this tactic. They are charged with placing strategic bids in order to move the auction along, thus achieving a higher sale price for given lot in the auction. BidGrid are a relatively new, innovative online auction site where the lowest unique bid under three pounds wins each auction. See how it works.
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