I decided to start a blog dedicated to Mystery Auctions on eBay. The main reason I am doing this is just to get the word out considering that most people do not know what a mystery auction is. The next reason is because I am running my own Mystery Auctions on eBay, and I am running a study with the mystery auctions. Mystery Auctions are auctions on eBay where the buyer or bidder does not know exactly what they are going to be getting until they make the purchase. Before you run away, understand that even though that is what a lot of mystery auctions are, some are quite different. In most cases it is a lot like a raffle. You pay whatever the set fixed price is for an auction in hope to win somthing worth much more then you payed for.
Mystery Auctions are set up one of two ways. One type of mystery auction is one that is an actual auction setting where there is one box that all of the bidders bid on. They bidders are bidding on a box, and that is all. In actuality the bidders are bidding on a box filled with all kinds of different valuables, they just don’t know exactly what they are going to get. Usually the box will start with a certain amount of items that the seller will tell the buyers about. The more bids that take place, the more stuff that gets put into the box. So at the end of the auction the winning bidder will get a box filled with a ton of different items. There is usually a lot of prizes for all the bidders as well, which means that you would get a prize just for bidding (whether you win or not).
The other type of Mystery Auctions are very different. These are the type of auctions that I will be running. This type really isn’t an auction at all. It is more like a raffle type game in most cases. The way that I am designing the auction is more like a strategic competition. This setting is a fixed price listing. This means that there is a quantity of items all set at a specific price. There is no bidding at all. So although you can hardly call this an auction it still falls under the category of “Mystery Auctions”. Finding a good name besides mystery auction is another goal I have in this study/experiment. So what happens is that a buyer would purchase from the listing for a set price and hope to win big.
Many people are very skeptical about these auctions and they should be. It is not very hard for a seller to rip of there buyers without them ever knowing it happend. A seller says that they are going to give away all this great stuff, but how do you ever know they are really doing that. If you know for sure that the seller is giving away what he/she says, then why wouldn’t you participate? Millions of people play the lottery every day, and there odds are terrible. With auctions like these your odds of winning big are great. The problem is that there are not many auctions that can prove that they are giving what they say. We however, believe that we have accomplished this problem. Our biggest problem is to make people realize what we are trying to do and why they should participate in our specific mystery auctions.
I will be posting a lot about this subject for the next couple of months or so. My plans are to run an experiment with the mystery auctions that I will explain in another article. I will be keeping track on my blog of everything so everyone can see exactly what is going on with my auctions. I will post who has won what, and exactly what prizes are left. It may seem hard to understand right now, but that is only because there is so much to it. This is just an introduction to introduce the idea.
We just started this study but we have listed some mystery auctions already. Check out our mystery auctions on our website at www.ebaymysteries.com/mysteryauction.html. You will always be able to find of our auctions at this page, which is much easier then going directly to eBay.
