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Sunday, January 2, 2011

Quibids Strategy 5: How to Win Against Aggressive Quibids Bidders

This is a part on Quibids Strategies. You should also check out my posts on Quibids Strategy: Best Times to Win, Quibids Strategy using Volunteer's Dilemma, Quibids Strategy Waiting Game and Quibids Strategy Using Bid Vouchers.

In this post, I am discussing my Quibids Strategy to win against aggressive bidders.

An Aggressive Bidder is defined as someone who doesn't wait for the clock to run down before he places a bid but instead places his/her bid immediately after another person places a bid.

If you regularly bid at Quibids or any other penny auction, I am sure you would have come across aggressive bidders and wondered what Quibids strategy will beat them. There are many strategies that aggressive bidders are using to prevent you from winning. For starters, they are playing on the psychology of a Quibids bidder. This is because no one likes to be outbid the next moment.

Consider this: You like an item and place a bid. As soon as you place the bid, someone outbids you. Now you place your bid again and within a second, you are again outbid by the same person. This is a natural cause of frustration and after a few bids, the person usually just gives up. This is not the right Quibids strategy.

However, you do not have to be afraid of aggressive bidders. You simply need to understand their psychology and their situation to really beat them. Remember that when bidders get aggressive, they have fewer number of bids left as they need to outbid every person. This is important to remember because when you spend 1 bid, the aggressive bidder might need to spend 5. This is because you are not the only other bidder - there are other bidders too. The aggressive bidder needs to spend bids to outbid every single bidder and thus loses bids.

Aggressive bidders can have a trick or two down their sleeves, though. You need to be aware of the Quibids strategies that they can use. For example, when there is an aggressive bidder and many other meeker bidders, they each rely on the other to place their bid, thinking they are protecting their bids. The aggressive bidder wants exactly this. It causes a situation that is described in Game Theory as Volunteer's Dilemma. Don't get caught in this trap!

So here is what you need to remember: to beat an aggressive bidder, you need to keep bidding. Never give up. If you give up, you are not just losing the auction to the aggressive bidder but you are also losing the amount that you spent towards your bids. Against an aggressive bidder, you can play the Waiting Game Quibids Strategy.

An aggressive Quibids bidding strategy is not very sustainable and the aggressive bidder will sooner or later run out of steam. You are not the only bidder but don't let the decision of others impact your own strategy. You can certainly beat aggressive bidders using my Quibids strategies described on this blog. Just remember never to get intimidated.

8 comments:

  1. Looks like you're also passionate about this Penny Auction thing. I totally agree with the 'Waiting Game Strategy". After checking out this Penny Auction Sites see my analysis on how this thing works (http://bidweiser.blogspot.com/) and how i manage to limit my loss.

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  2. bidweiser, it is nice to connect to a fellow blogger, thanks for dropping by. I have hundreds of posts, all aimed at only one thing - how to win at penny auctions and how to limit your losses and increase your winning chances.

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  3. Sid, this is somewhat confusing: on one hand you suggest never giving up, so keep bidding against the aggressive bidder, on the other hand you say to use the waiting strategy where, if I understand correctly, you wait, you don't bid. Can you clarify exactly how you propose to play against the aggressive bidder?

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  4. Nope. In the waiting strategy, you wait till the last second to bid. If you don't bid, you are only allowing the aggressive bidder to win. The trick is to understand that the person who is aggressive is going to use up more bids than the person who waits till the last moment to place the bid. If you miss out on placing your bid even once, you fall into the volunteer's dilemma (read about it on my blog) and you lose.

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  5. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  6. what are the strategies to overcome shill bidders.

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  7. THANK YOU for the help! Without this I probably wouldn't have won! I was bidding against 2 other people who had automatic bids on and it just kept going and I was getting scared and very anxious but I remembered you saying the way you lose is giving up, so after bidding 11 times = $6.60, and the bid getting to $0.24 I got a $50 Canadian Tire giftcard :) Many people have gotten better deals of course but keep in mind this is still day 1 and only my second auction lol thanks again for keeping me confident :D

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  8. To me the hardest question is: when to cut your losses, if you are playing the waiting game. There are, in the end, limits. Last year, when I was getting started, a couple of times I came up against bidders, be they aggressive or waiting, that simply outlasted any reasonable number of bids - and even and unreasonable number of bids. Since then I have wondered if/where I might draw a line in the sand, since I have found that there is a big gap in the number of bids for a given item - kind of a barbell distribution, with a group of low amounts and then a bump and tail in the distribution at higher amounts.

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