Bass Pundit

Bust on Ebay: This morning 7 Team Daiwa S-103HVA reels came up for auction. This was out of a lot of 10 reels. 3 of the 10 were originally listed at a very reasonable "Buy It Now" price. I snapped up those three reels. In today's auction I was prepared to buy as many as 4 more reels if I could get them for the same "Buy It Now" price or less. As it turned out I only won 1 reel and that at the 2nd highest price of the 7 reels auctioned off today. Of the 7 reels auctioned today I feel that only 2 of them went for a good price once shipping charges are figured in. All of today's reels went for more than the "Buy It Now" price I snapped up. I feel like 3 of the reels today, including the one I got, were over valued by $10-$15. The amount that I did pay was exactly the highest amount I was willing to pay for 1 of these reels, this provided he eliminates the shipping charge on the reel because I've already paid $30 in shipping for the "Buy It Now" reels. I figure $30 is about $20 more than it will actually take to ship 4 reels. The reel that I just got cost $5.25 to ship USPS Priority Mail.

Now that I have some hindsight I can see that my bidding strategy was flawed. The earliest ending reels went cheapest and the latest going reels went highest. My strategy was to try and low ball at first, then to go to my upper limit at the end if I was not winning anything. Lesson learned: If multiple same items of interest come up for auction and end in a compressed time frame, start out bidding as high as you will go and adjust from there. That said it is hard to know how that would have worked out because you never know how high the winning bidders maximum bid was.

Another thing I got messed up on was that the 1st two reels ended less than a minute apart. Because of this I didn't get my bid for the 2nd reel in time and that reel went for the cheapest of them all. I do not however know if my max bid would have been enough because it was my same max bid on reel #1, which obviously wasn't high enough.

I guess I will keep my eye open to possibly get another reel or two, but I will keep my bidding at this point to only what I consider to be a good value. I feel like 50% to 60% off original price is about right for a used reel in good condition.

Reel Recap: Originally I was going to spend about $400 on two New baitcast reels, a Team Daiwa X and Revo SX. Instead I got Ebay on the brain and bought 5 used reels for for about $40 more than I would have spent on the new reels. Hopefully I have gotten a good value. I won't really know until I see how these used reels perform. I did get a bum reel from Ebay once.