That escalated quickly
 

From £0.25 to £7,599.00 within two days, where will it end?

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/403441872830?

7 days to go!

Mind blown ?. Wow.

Never mind a bottle the seller (mary-tin-collector) owes a weekend away to whoever that curtain was bought from.

Not been closely keeping track but I believe quite a few of the patches therein have already sold for hundreds and one a couple thousand of pounds.

WOW! £7,599.00 for a 3 Commando 2 Troop cloth title. Is it really worth that much?

Mick

Yes, if one finds absurd exorbitance over a bit of cloth reasonable.

CB

I think we've all paid a little over the odds for a badge we really want, but this is crazy! Nice little retirement package for the seller though!
Chris

£7863 now!!!:eek:

Be interesting to see if the winning bidder actually pays or whether he will get cold feet. I don't suppose we'll get to know unless the item is re-listed.

Dave.

Now I wouldn’t want to try to explain that one to the wife :eek::eek::eek:

Gerard

Seems to be a battle royale between two bidders which has taken it from £185 to where it is now. Strange bidding tactics with over a week to go.

He can't be married, unless he's got quite the substantial secret badge fund!

I would guess that one bidder (who is winning) initially put a very high maximum bid and the other one keeps 'testing' how high it is , thus bumping the price up very quickly. A lot of the bids are "automatic" , so each time the second bidder tries they get the "you have been outbid" message and try a slightly higher bid.

What happens if final winning bidder backs out / refuses to pay , does the second place bidder pay the last amount they bid or are all the 'winners' bids removed ? :confused:

.

If the winning bidder retracts their last bid citing an error in the amount, the auction would then show the next highest bidder as being the person winning the auction.

The person who withdraws the bid is supposed to then enter another amount but, quite often, people fail to do so.

I’m pretty sure that the seller could then raise an objection with eBay, however I’m not sure what action they would then take, if any, in terms of legal enforcement of what is supposed to be a binding contract.

That tactic doesn’t make much sense with a week to go and obvious serious competition emerging.

I always say on eBay he who bids last, bids best.

Early bird bids only ever give rival bidders the time and chance to reflect then increase their bid.

I believe the seller can go to the next highest bidder. I’m unsure if this method removes all their bids however or just takes it to the underbidders highest bid.

So at present that may mean it falling back to £7,763 or £227! Quite a difference.

Thanks guys , I wasn't sure about the rules and wondered if someone could bump up the price and then withdraw their bid.

.

They certainly can. Much easier to do so if they’re in league with the seller as they can easily cancel their bid prior to the auction ending.

After the auction has ended it can also go to next highest bidder as I mentioned with the ‘second chance’ offer.

1 of two things happening here:
1) Shill bidding.
2) Neither party has fully read the description, and both believe they are getting the whole collection.

I know where I would place my bet.
T

If the under bidder retracts his last bid then it removes all of the bids that the bidder has made.

Makes you wonder
 

Could it be the same person bidding , to put others off and retract their highest bid at the last minute????

Just a thought

Tony C

Even if you like military badges ( and presumably we all do or we would not be here on this site ) someone being prepared to pay this sort of figure ( for an item that perhaps should be in a museum ) does at the very least make you think that in this country some people can appear to be prepared to pay mindblowing figures on a badge whilst at the same time there are families relying on food banks and other families wondering how they are going to pay for their future energy bills.

Certainly food for thought !

P.

Unfortunately that is a hard reality of life and how it has always been without intending to sound crass or insensitive.

I expect many low income families could not spare the funds for the items you or I currently have for sale in the classifieds.

Long gone are the days when this was an inexpensive, swapsie hobby enjoyed by school children. For decades the hobby has increasingly grown out of reach for many.

Back to topic…

I’m surprised more SF collectors have not yet commented on this patch or ventured opinions on the current price.

I should like to hear the opinions of Mike B, Belly, 3battalion, HamandJam et al.

Price increases
 

When the pandemic started nearly two years ago with HM government handing out sums of money to people who were in need someone said to me "Who is paying for this?"

My reply was "we will as everything will go up in price", but I never expected to see a cloth badge rise in price as this one has.

What price will it reach?

Will the bidder pay up?

We await and see . . !

Rob

Someone I used to see every week sold one of several of the same badge out of a 50p/£ box that he didn't t rate as real, the buyer who was more than happy to end up paying nearly £1000 turned out to be an investment group.

Hello Luke
To a specialist Commando collector like me - the early 3 Commando with Troop numerals are extremely desirable. Relatively few survive. I was not going to comment, but clearly the market is difficult to fathom at times. It will be interesting to see how this all concludes ...
Regards
Mike

Thanks very much Mike.

So it’s a particularly rare one and early by sounds of it. That in mind and potentially being a final gap in someone’s cloth Commando collection it could easily be a ‘must have’ for some ardent collectors.

One wonders quite where it will end up!

In deed early and rare ... one of the few gaps in my WW2 Commando insignia collection ... but there are 'must have' prices and 'must have' prices as fellow members have commented. I hope the end result is mutually 'happy and agreeable', for vendor and buyer ... and that the deal concludes with integrity.

I knew one collector of early raf badges, who on learning that the end is coming, brought every badge he needed to complete his collection, regardless of the price, and enjoyed having them for just over a year.

The other interpretation as mentioned above is pure Shill bidding. I'm hopeless at spotting that sort of thing but is there anything to indicate from this and or previous sales that this may be the case?

Shill bidding relies on one of the bidders being legitimate.

I’ve been shill bid twice on eBay each time it went up in 50p increments until the one which beat my bid was retracted. Obviously that was little league compared to this.

So here either a legitimate bidder has bid £7,863 or £7,763.

Notwithstanding given what has been said by Mike B it would not surprise me if both are legitimate bids.

I don't know if it has any bearing, in regards to shill bidding, but last time I looked the leader was "private" so we could not see an ID.

Although not in my area, there are some high price, nothing like this I don't think, pieces I would truly love to have, but have no expectation of ever getting. I can, and am happy to put a nice reproduction in just to complete a display. At present I only have one such patch, an Australian nurses sleeve patch. I am quite happy with it, and even more so as it was a gift from a fellow member. If someday and by miracle I ever got a real one I would probably still keep it in the display because of it being a gift.

Terry

If, there is something unsual that I am bidding on, not necessarily on anything in this league, I will leave an early bid, as it makes it more difficult for the seller to accept a private offer from another buyer before the auction has run its course.

Several items that I have been bidding on have 'disappeared' over the years and it is annoying, not to mention ungentlemanly.

Leaving an early bid has no impact at all on the ability of the seller to end his auction early, for whatever reason. Human nature being what it is, there will always be incentives to end auctions early. I know of sellers who endorse their listings "So as to be fair to all, please note we never end our auctions early". They have done, and will probably do so again if they get an offer they can't refuse. It has nothing to do will gentlemanly behaviour. Its about making money.

Dave.

It is to do with making money, but if the seller accepts an offer, he never knows what he could have got for his item.

With the current Commando title he might have been delighted and possibly accepted a £3,000 offer within the first 24 hours. If, I had been in his position, the first question that I would have asked myself would be, "What is so special about this cloth title that someone is offering me £3,000 for it?"

I would be tempted to take the offer as it is a large amount of money, and if I didn't, I would run the risk of having to sell it to the highest bidder at the end of the auction for £9.99, if that was the highest bid.

If the offer, had been £50, I would almost certainly have let the auction run its course.

Not particularly gentlemanly, I will admit.

Simon.

Your third paragraph highlights the flaw in the first.

Last week I ‘best offer’-ed someone £9 plus P&P for a 1916 Devonshire. They rejected it outright, the auction ran and it sold for a maiden £7.50 to someone else. So that seller knows he could’ve got £9 but ended up with £7.50.

That’s why auctions are a gamble. Things can sell for more than they’re worth or less, no guarantees.

The whole idea of an auction is not particularly gentlemanly if you think about it, person with more money always wins.

I do not believe this is the case; there is nothing in the bidding history from the current high bidder and underbidder that I would consider suspect. Both bid multiple times on different items from different sellers and from different categories; one bidder in particular on ebay Germany and France.

Both do seem to withdraw bids quite often though, that is something I consider ungentlemanly but within the rules.

Not exactly true. I had some items I bought at auction for a particular piece, and having bought them found the gents name and number etc. So spent time researching them, and keeping the item I wanted listed the others on ebay (as I had them already, in better condition). Cut a long story short, the family had asked the auction house to clear the house, not checking the loft, and didnt even know these bits were being sold, until they had been. They wanted them back, and I agreed, for my money back, and had cleaned them and tidied them up. Eight Lots, three had bids. Ebay charged me a quarter of the start price for removing the three that had bids, precisely to deter from removing listings. So doing a good deed when the family couldn't be bothered to check the house cost me!

After receiving two eMails from a very experienced and knowledgeable collector concerning this “bidding war” I am leaning toward the idea that something is definitely not “Kosher” here. Watch for a couple of others to suddenly materialize in a month or two! D.J.

Something odd, indeed. Third highest bidder, e***7, dropped out at £185. Two bidders, 3***0 (private) and c***a (1282), took it from there. Fishy??? . . .

Are you suggesting this patch is a fake?