It could have been much, much worse! Believe me, much MUCH worse!

Okay, I had your suspense up didn't I?

However, notice what happened here. I was expecting that with one extra bid besides my own, I would be paying under $15 for the game. As you can see, this is NOT what happened.

Let's look at the bid history of the finished auction...

You can see the 13.97, which was the old top of this history before I placed my $3009.06 bid.

The bidder, c***s, had a maximum bid of his own and what happens at this point is eBay will engage the war between maximum bids until one outbids the other. In my fortunate case, that bidder's maximum bid was $31.97.

In this case, I would have been better off purchasing the Buy-It-Now offer I showed you earlier...

With the shipping, this would have been $30.09. You may have noticed that early on in this Resource, I had a figure of "3009" in the Place Bid field. At that point, I had forgotten the decimal point and then, when I saw it, I laughed and decided I would try to be funny and just leave it that way, since it only goes by increment until the highest bid is reached.

Wow!!

Even here, I made an error! To make this a Plan B option, my maximum bid should have been $24.90!. If I had been outbid, all I would have had to have done would have go to this other listing and purchase it!

What Could Have Happened?

The bid history shocked me into submission! We don't play games on eBay - we only play games in our video game consoles!

If another bidder had put a maximum bid of $50, I would have been paying $52 for that auction! eBay would have continued to go up the bid increments until this other bidder was outbid!

If someone else was being funny like I was, the laugh would have been on me!

Say a bidder put his maximum bid at $200, $500, $1000, or even $3000!?

That's right - the seller would see it and laugh! Very likely, this would be adjusted, but how much of a fool would I look like? If the other bidder had a higher astronomical figure than I did, how would he look?

I would have to do a lot of explaining. I would have to beg the seller to adjust the price to cover my folly!

The scary thing about all this is - this goes on more than you might think, though it is uncommon and usually without incident.

As it stands, I paid almost $5 more than I was willing to pay. I paid it and learned my lesson!

I know this is very long at this point, but now I will, in one page, show you how to do this right and get that piece of treasure you've always wanted - virtually every time. I will do it in pictures, now that you have all the ins and outs of what to do...