My heart was in my mouth…..

I had a metal shed listed on eBay and the listing was due to end today at 5.15pm.  Yesterday I received a call on my mobile from someone asking if I would be interested in accepting £120 cash for it.

Now the last time I’d looked at the listing before this call, the bids had gone up to £75, from a starting price of 99p; so I figured that if this person was offering that much, it must have gone up since.  Tempting as it was, I declined the offer for 3 reasons:

1. It’s against ebay policy to pull a listing in order to do a deal outside of ebay
2. It’s bad form, when other people have already been bidding on it
3. I really wanted to test the strength of my sales copy and put my faith in the bidding system, trusting that the market would find the true price of my item

After the phone call I went onto ebay to check the latest price and my heart sank – it was still going for £75; but 8 different people had placed bids and there were 55 people watching the item, so I was quietly confident that the price would move nearer the end of the auction.

Today, with 30 minutes to go, the shed price had crawled up to £77; then £79 with just 15 minutes remaining – and there it stayed until there were just 28 seconds to go.  Now despite me being the type of person who usually bids with about 5 seconds to go, using a sniper tool, I resigned myself to the fact that I had turned down a £120 cash purchase in favour of £79 (before fees).  But hey, at least my conscience was clear.

And that’s when the magic happened…..

A 3-way bidding war in the dying seconds of the auction pushed the price up by £76 in 28 seconds, ending the auction at £155.  The person who won it was the same one who had offered me the £120 the day before.  Now he’ll be paying via PayPal and I should make about £134 after fees, with the added security of PayPal’s seller protection.

I love it when a calculated risk pays off 🙂