Sarah St. horsecar post card on ebay

[Bob Rathke]

Without other (independent) information, buyer identification and
motivation is difficult to determine, but there are some methods for
inferring why a buyer behaved the way he did:

1. Click on the "Bid History" box.  It shows that there were 12 bids for
this post card.  The seller set a starting bid of $9.95, but the first
bid on Feb.18 was for $19.99. This was quite a jump for a first bid -
the first bidder could have bid a token 50-cents or $1 increase, and
then wait to see what would happen, but he must have believed that this
item was worth a lot more than $9.95.  Then, over the next 5 days the
subsequent bids progressed rather evenly to the $150 level - there were
5 serious bidders, so it's unlikely that a shill was involved.  Then at
the last minutes, on Feb. 18, "joycemoorish" came out of nowehere with
the $152.49 winning bid.  Sometimes people who really want the item will
stand back and watch the bidding, then try to get in a high bid in the
last minutes of the auction before any of the other bidders have time to
react.  Also, Joyce Moorish is not necessarily the bidder's name or even
e-mail address.  Sometimes bidders use an alternate address or the
address of a friend, for various reasons.

2. Click on the number in praenthesis after the bidders' names.  This
shows you the comments that other people have made about the bidder.
The winning bidder has 251 comments, and another bidder has 354 comments
- these numbers represent the potential number of items they have
purchased on ebay.  251-354 are not the numbers of casual buyers.  If
you read the verbatim comments, you'll also see that these people are
SELLERS as well as buyers.

Conclusion: these bidders all recognized the value (to "someone") of
this post card, and they knew that they can sell it for a lot more than
they paid for it.   Watch for this card to appear again on ebay,
possibly packaged with some other items that will increase it's value
even more.  And look for these bidders to bid on other similar items
that come up for sale.  They're on to something.

I know a person who buys collections of seemingly low value items on
ebay, splits them up and re-assembles them as theme collections that he
knows people are interested in. He jazzes up the description of the
collection, then re-sells them on ebay for many times the price he paid
for them.  This is his full time job, and he grosses close to six
figures a year.

However...I still don't know why anyone would pay $152.49 - or the
eventual higher price - for a horse car post card.

Bob 2/23