First Ever eBay Purchase

I'm in the market for an mp3 player. Not just an mp3 player though because most of my music collection is encoded in OGG. So that narrows down my choices to iRiver or Samsung. I started to lean towards Samsung because the newer ones are becoming more and more stylish. Aside from that, some of the Samsung players now come with Bluetooth. Paired with a pair of Bluetooth stereo, you can get your music wirelessly. What's more, the Samsung can support two BT devices. More fun for everyone. Still, I believe the iRiver has better sound quality.

So I logged on to eBay and did a search on iRiver x20. A couple of hits came up. One has a starting price of $50 on Marchi 31, currently $60, and the auction ends in 9 hours. I've never tried bidding on eBay before, so I immediately signed up and put in a bid of $61. There was an instant counter-bid of $62. Apparently, eBay has this feature called proxy bidding. Put in your max price, and eBay will slowly counter any winning bid up to the maximum bid price you define. So I put in $63. Another automatic bid of $64. I put in $65, and lucky for me that's how it remained till the close of the auction.

What I didn't notice is that the seller has another x20 for sale, ending at about the same time. With all my attention on the first x20, the second one slipped through my radar - there's only 1 bidder for it with a few minutes to go. Notwithstanding the fact that I've already won an x20, I put in a bid for $51. Proxy bidding upped it to $52. I was about to bid more when the auction ended. Checking the bidding log, my rival increased his max bid to $55.55. Too bad for him, some stranger swooped in and won the auction at $56.55.

Ah, didn't know this eBay thing could get so competitive and addictive. The way I like it.