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Well, I have to admit I was a bit "grumpy" about it when I saw it too (the buy now option) as it was instituted. I agree with Dave, the way its done on ebay is that the buy now option winner pays a "premium" for it to just end. The "buy now" prices seemed too low to me (based on retail). They should be higher. Finally, once someone bids at the "reserve" price, then the buy now option should disappear. You have to have a reserve price or someone will come in and bid $10 to just to get rid of the buy now option.

Buy now should not be an easy option. It should end in the buyer paying a premium for the luxury of using it.

This is all very complicated, and perhaps the straight old fashioned bidding is the only way to go here.

Mike

I understand the point you are driving at, but some members have asked for solutions to the time zone problem and I thought this might be a good solution. What I hope is that we can find a fix where in the end this ends up being a good deal to the buyer too.

We will continue to tweak on this. I just put today's up, but on the next one I will make the BIN price closer to market value and see how that goes.

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Brock Poling
Columbus, Ohio
http://www.polingguitars.com

Brock, here's another suggestion to fix the time zone problem. As it is now, you still (potentially) have one - if you post the auction in the afternoon, our European friends may already be in bed, and once they wake up, somebody may have used the buy-it-now option.

What you could do, is have every auction open for - say - 48 hours. Every forum member has one bid, which is submitted non-publicly (e.g., through a pm to you or Lance).

That way there's no advantage to submitting a bid early on, or later in the auction. Everyone has one shot - whatever s/he is willing to pay for the tonewood - and there's no way of sniping in the last seconds or stuff like that.

You could still protect high-value items like the MadRose through a publicly announced reserve price (a reserve price might be a good idea anyway, so you don't get 100 $1 bids )

The final price could be determined two ways:
1) The highest bidder pays whatever his/her bid was
2) Like eBay: The highest bidder pays the amount of the 2nd-highest bid + some increment (e.g. $5)

This type of sealed-bid auction may be not as exciting as a public auction, but it gives everyone a fair shot. And it may be more fun than the buy-it now.

cheers, Christian

This is silly. Brock, Lance, you will never make everybody happy here. You did not start this forum to deal with auction issues. My last suggestion is this: Use private auctions on Ebay. So what if Ebay makes $5 (or whatever). Make it the policy that WE pay the Ebay fee. I am good with this. This is $$ to support the site.

With private auctions, you can set it up so that only OLFers can see it (and anybody else that you want who might want to remain anonymous). It would not be visible to normal Ebayers. And, as a result, all the headaches are handled for you. And, no time zone problems.

As for snipers and sniper software, this is a relatively small community. We should all be willing to shake hands and agree to not do that. And if one does it (often) it will become obvious. But, do not confuse automatic bid promotion at or near the end of an auction. It can look like sniping and still not be sniping.

Use Ebay or the like. Let them handle the headaches.

Mike

I say we have dueling dreadnaughts at sunrise and settle this like men !!

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I have said my last in this, but I want to say to filippo, who now also seem to not have any woodworking to do !
Yes they own it. BUT, there is an old saying - the customer is always right.
and as there are fees and costs involved, then questions and saying what one feels about different situations are in order. If you buy anything anywhere and you feel they"lets say stewmac" are doing something against your liking, wouldn´t you say this ? or would you go - it´s ok, they own stewmac, I dont ? .

Noone needs to get angry or upset at anyone for me saying what I feel about this Lance for one I dont know where you´re all from and what your background is. I can only speak for me. I am a carpenter, so is my father. perhaps its my middleclass ways that are talking, I have never been much for playing golf. .

Lars.

"The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" theme song is now stuck in my head.

That is what I meant! Why do you do that so much? I am good with whatever B&L wanna do. This thread seemed to open an opportunity to discuss possible improvements. Thats all. I think trying to see this through the eyes of those who are "time zone challenged" is a good thing. That is all Lars is talking about.

Mike

Every prominent forum I can think of right now is a business, and makes somebody some scratch. I have no problem with that, whatsoever. Nobody should ever feel guilty, or be made to, about making money for giving people what they want. The free service provided is, once again, up to the discretion of those running the business. Hey, look at Google!

The language of 'keeping the roof up', and asking for donations, at various forums is what tends to nudge people into assuming that they're non-profits. Non-profits have to be much more accountable than businesses, and if someone thinks they're dealing with one then they're going to expect that. (and then things get messy)

_________________
Bob Garrish
Former Canonized Purveyor of Fine CNC Luthier Services

Thank you Bob, that was exactly what I was trying to get at with my original posting. Of course everybody deserves to be rewarded for their work, it is just the matter of viewing things as donations. It has nothing to do with the people who run the site, just the site itself. I think people should be able to ask questions about an organization they support, and it should not be an issue or hinderance.

Bob, the funny thing about non-profits is good ones make the employees (at the top) a LOT of money. They get tax deductions etc. But they are accountable to the government. There REALLY is no such thing as a non-profit business (for very long). All successful non-profits make a profit that dissapears into salaries, improvements, etc. If there is any "potential" profit left at the end of the year, a policy will exist to convert it into bonuses (or is that boni?).

A lot of "green" type businesses tend to be non-profit giving folks the sense that they are altruistic. Working at a a loss, living on bread and water...

Mike

OK, back to the subject at hand. What I do not understand about allowing BIN once a bid is placed is this. Lets say NOBODY uses BIN the whole time the auction is in play, and the bid price creeps gnawingling close to the BIN price. You have just set an artificial ceiling on the potential of the auction! Right? Why would anybody bid OVER that price? If a BIN price is set at say, 200, retail is 275, etc, and the price gets to $175, nobody is going to do anything except see how close to the BIN price they can get and gamble nobody will use BIN.

This is why Ebay kills BIN once a bid is placed.

Mike

Actually Ebay kills the BIN once it hits the reserve, not on the first bid.

I really don't mind that we put a ceiling in place. In the end I DO see this as an opportunity for folks to get something for a little less than retail. I also hear what you are saying. Some good ideas have been suggested here. We will tweak this to try to incorporate some of these ideas.

I think the 48 hour auction will help, but I still think that for folks that can't be around at the end it is going to be the same problem as before. I actually think an auction sniper type of tool would be a good thing here. that way you could have a tool proxy your bid near the end....

we will keep thinking on this, I appreciate everyone's ideas.

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Brock Poling
Columbus, Ohio
http://www.polingguitars.com

And that's what I appreciate about you, Brock. You engage in a dialogue.

First off Lars I have to say that I like you and that my comments are not meant to to put you down (or anyone who thinks the customer is always right).

The Customer is not always right, and actually usually if the customer really wants "the item" they will be made to pay or do what ever the vendor says to get it. Can you actually go into a store (any store) and tell them that you only want to pay $XXX for an item that is listed at $X,XXX, Just because you, the customer is always right? No you can't.

In the case of the OLF, the customer is not always right. This is Lance and Brock's sandbox and they don't have to do anything they don't want to. The very cool thing about them is that they really work hard at "Trying" to please everyone, but they also know that that is almost always a loosing battle. To their credit, they have done and continue to do a very good job of Almost pleasing everyone.

They work hard to make the best Luthier community on the net and they deserve to get paid (big or small) for their ideas and efforts.

As far as the term "Auction" that is certainly changing with the times. It has certainly come to encompass much more than a "highest bidder wins" mentality. The world is continually changing and we all need to (even if we don't like it or want to) get on board if we want to keep up.

That's it from me. I am surprised at the number of opinions on how Lance and Brock run their ship. Mind you, I use to have some strong opinions of how this ship should run but eventually, I just came to the realization that I just need to take what I want and forget about the rest. If I don't like something, usually it's not worth my effort or emotion to raise a stink (but sometimes it's just fun to "get into it"

Besides, I don't have any woodworking to do either Ya Right!

Cheers.

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Well said Rod. I totally agree.
To All I may have upset. I am sorry for my bad acting. Personal things is going on around me and I guess I let it out on you´ll . Again, I am sorry If I may have made anyone felt bad. Whatever I may think of Auctions it was not something I had to made this much fuss for.

Your normally friendly buddy, Lars.

I dunno, what Rod said?


Mike

Brock,

Of course you are correct that the reserve (if there is one, and there is not always one) has to be met before Ebay kills BIN. When a bidder bids on a BIN item, they are hoping to get it for a price lower than BIN. But, it is way possible for the bid price to go beyond the BIN price after that point.

However, that said, I have thought about this for a while and come to this conclusion. Especially after looking at the recent auction. If you set the BIN price high enough (like you did this time), it works.

Mike

As I say we will keep tweaking it. Maybe putting the BIN closer to market value is the way to go. I hear what you are saying about a ceiling, but I am not sure how to avoid it. I really would like to find a way to let our international members have a fighting chance.

For those who suggested we run these on ebay and link in... do any of you remember that the OLF used to have an auction site? These were REAL auctions. Nobody used it. We invested heavy in the software and the monthly maintenance and it flopped big time. I think that we learned like the swap meet, our auctions work best when they run in the threads. It seems to have more of a spirit of community and competitiveness to it.

The only thing I can really see as alternative to the BIN is a proxy bidding system. We will talk to our coding team and see what it might take for us to set up something like this. Let you make a post and specify a date and time you want it to post, then even if you are not online you can get in at the end of the auction. Whether we elect to do this or not will probably depend on how elegant the solution is and what it costs. But we will investigate it.

But I am still open to discussing this. I am not stuck on the particulars of how this works, my aim is making this something everyone feels like they can participate in.

_________________
Brock Poling
Columbus, Ohio
http://www.polingguitars.com

I think the Luthier Auctions flopped because the software sucked. The interface design was circa Windows 3.2 and I couldn't ever place a bid because there were server errors every time I tried.

Hi Brock,
I'll just throw in another idea which doesn't require a proxy system or any programming effort. Right now you're using a hard stopping rule - the auction ends at 12pm - no matter what.

You could also switch to a soft stopping rule - the auction ends if within, say 24 hours after the last bid has been placed, nobody has entered a new bid. So each new bid opens a new 24 hour window in which bids can be placed. In other words - the auction always ends 24 hours after the last bid has been placed.

This would give everybody time to enter a bid, it doesn't require a BIN, bids could still be public and run in a thread in the forum. Worst case - the auction drags on for a month

Amazon has used this kind of soft stopping rule for a while (although they used a 10 minute time window).

best, Christian

I like the idea of the hard stop, but understand how it effects folks on the other side of the planet (btw, how many sides can a planet have?)

Brock, I do not understand how placing an item for sale on ebay and linking back here to it would not work. Could we try it? The big downside would be for folks who are ebay shy, and I get that too.

I am talking about the private auction. Where one has to register and be accepted as a bidder. I think if you set it up correctly, once accepted, always accepted. I just hate to see you guys spend money and effort on something that could be accomplished by possibly using ebay.

Mike

While I've got enough wood for my next 100 sitting around already, I'll second the soft stop as a great idea. It need only be 12 hours to make it fair for all, and it could also lead to higher end-values. I don't see auctions lasting significantly longer because of it.

So far as the BIN goes, set it above market. Then it's there for someone who really wants that particular set, and is willing to pay for it, but there'll be no arguments if it's used.

_________________
Bob Garrish
Former Canonized Purveyor of Fine CNC Luthier Services