eSnipe and Bid Psychology

Question for Bid Deconstructionists: Is Anything More Real than Bidding?

It's my thought that eBay unknowingly tapped into an experience that very few humans had direct contact with in their lives until eBay burst onto the scene a few years ago: the power of placing a bid at an auction. Laugh if you want but I did in fact have some experience at auctions when I was younger and they were thrilling. One was an auction I attended when I was very young and couldn't possibly afford anything there. In its own way, the bid was everything.

Pre eSnipe: One of the Most Thrilling Experiences of My Life

I think I had $2 with me, and the auction was in Southern California where, for reasons now obscure to me, people were bidding on totally cool stuff (for an 11-year-old) like Estes Rockets and Cox gas-powered toy cars. Even then those items went new (and all items being bid on were) they went for at least tens of dollars. The auctioneer had the biggest heart of any auctioneer I can remember, because when he announced a new-in-the-box Cox trike motorcycle I leapt up and shouted "Two dollars". He immediately accepted my bid and closed the auction! I was the only kid there, and it throughout the rest of the event similar items went for much higher. I remember that bidding experience fondly to this day, perhaps 30 years later, and the tension is still almost palpable when I think about placing my bid.

More Than You Wanted to Know The Bid

Another auction had two bidding experiences with opposite results. I went to a Seattle school district auction where they sold detritus from the last 60 years, including musical instruments. I bid for a silver plated alto horn, a sort of relation to the French horn that never got much traction here in the States, and got it for about $50. Musical instruments are strange, in that if you bid in the right place and time an item that would go to $200 might win for $50 because there are no auction snipers or musical instrument experts to tell the difference.

Winning the Bid Without Sniping: Counterproductive

But winning that bid was actually counterproductive, because I ended up in a bidding war over an awful Martin Committee trombone and paid something like $150 for it when I should have stopped halfway through. But the glue that holds these experiences together is that every bidding incident was a powerful event. For reasons I can't quite articulate, they had an adrenaline rush that just finding the same things in a thrift store at the same prices wouldn't quite have matched. It would be fascinating to get functional MRIs of auction bidders and see what other life experiences they match, but I can tell you that placing a bid just isn't like buying something in a catalog or even on Amazon. Sniper or not, to buy on eBay with an auction bid is a viscerally different thing than "Add to Shopping Cart".