auction stupidity

I get a laugh out of online auctions. Lots of people seem to add the words ‘online’ and ‘auction’ together and come up with = bargain! wrong!!

Take this auction (no longer online) by traditional auction house Gray Edsell Timms at GraysOnline. It’s an auction of the hottest electronic toy around – iPods. Current models too, about 10 Video, 13 Nano/4G and a lonely 1Gb Shuffle.

The auction still has two days to go, but the top bid for each item type (not each item – yet!) comfortably exceeds the cost of buying the product new from the Apple website. It’s not immediately obvious, because GraysOnline charge a 12.5% ‘buyers premium’ (whatever that is!) and $12 delivery. So by the time you bid $169 for the shuffle (as ‘K.M’ from Epping NSW already has!) and add the extras, it has cost you $202. Apple have it for $199 – free delivery. Duh!

The top bid for a Nano already totals $16 more than the Apple Store!

I’ll be watching this auction with interest and I’ll report back with the final prices. Should be worth a laugh!

OK, here’s the update

As the auction closes it’s got even sillier than before. Someone has bid $204 for the Shuffle which will cost them a total of $241.50, that’s $42 dollars more than if they bought it from Apple!

Now, here is a screen grab of the current Nano price at Apple Australia. So, you wouldn’t want to bid more than $309 (do the maths) at Grays, would you? Well, that’s exactly what 13 people did today, one of the bids will end up costing $45 more than the retail price… yay! fools and money 🙂

There was less interest in the 60Gb Video model, two people actually beat the retail price by $5, another five got a price equal to retail, while few nongs paid up to $27 more than retail. I just love it!