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Comment by jamesfong | Hacker News Reader

I would be so on this if it didn't look shady for me to bid on my own site.

Hi James,

Well, if this is your site you are about to have an unsatisfied customer.

I thought of helping your auction along a bit, so I signed up and made a $100 deposit in 'credits' on the off chance that I would be winning the bid.

Only AFTER going through all that (10 minutes of form filling, credit card hunting and so on) and making my bid I'm being told that I'm already outbid, because the highest bid shown is not the highest bid.

This sucks.

If the bid shown is not the highest bid you should say so loud and clear before accepting payments or bids. Not afterwards, that's just plain scammy. Sorry for the harsh words, but that is my opinion about this.

Now we'll get to see how well your return policy works.

Not impressed.

The refund option is somewhat hidden, care to point the way ?

EDIT: REFUND RECEIVED.

That's pretty good customer service, I'll give you that much.

That is fairly standard in an auction site to not see the underlying highest bid.

But I can see how it is annoying that you have to pay first before you know whether you win an item. They should change that some how. Maybe auctioning is not the right format for a psuedo-virtual currency.

It may be standard, but it isn't proper to say 'high bid' when it isn't the high bid.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_bid

In a normal situation that would not matter because you would hold on to your money. In a pre-pay system this is total nonsense because you are paying first to pre-pay for your account (on the one item that you may be interested in) and afterwards you bid using your credits. Because of the two stage nature of the process there is now a ratchet, you've already paid your money, now you find that it was useless.

Major design flaw.

The bidding is normally decoupled from the actual payment, by moving the payment up-front the whole thing breaks.

I see what you mean here. In general our users are using credits they already own, but when you have to buy the majority of them it can get quite annoying as you said. For the time being, rest assured that you'll have no problem returning unused credits. Thanks again for the feedback. This is one of our first high-vale items and we are monitoring the dynamics of bidding and buying credits :)

Why not switch away from the pre-pay system ?

Simply do a pre-auth on the card for the amount and charge when the buyer wins the auction ? Customer satisfaction guaranteed, 0 refunds and a lot less people like me that will get confused and / or pissed off.

My guess would be fraud - they're looking to compete with e-bay by side-stepping their most resource-draining problem. Great idea, IMO.

As the current high bidder (but knowing full well that I'll get outbid before the end anyway), I was also a little surprised by the fact that my "full" bid wasn't used but rather only the amount needed to beat the highest bid by a bid increment.

That's exactly how ebay works, so I didn't find it all that shocking, but my honest expectation was that it would show my full bid.

Anyway, I suspect there's a lot of returns coming in the next week (for all but one of us... :) )

Hello, we implemented it this way since eBay is the most popular auction site out there and that's how they've always done it. However we do understand the confusion here. Do you think it's better to change the wording or simply move away from a proxy style auction? We hae been debating this internally as well but always deafult to eBay's functionality in these cases. You can use the contact form to request a refund. Just give us your username and it will be done right away. Thanks for the valuable feedback.

As to the changes in the wording, if you switch to a regular style 'highest price' listed I think you'll find yourself doing a lot less in refunds, and you won't need to change the wording.

Right now the only wording that would be acceptable before signing up or at least before paying for credits should be:

"Beware, the highest bid you have seen on the item that you are interested in may be an arbitrary amount over the bid displayed"

and

"Second highest bid" on the item page, or a big fat disclaimer that in spite of the two-stage payment process you are using a proxy bidding system, which means that the chance is very large that your bid will not be the winning bid after you place it, and that you'll just end up buying a bunch of credits, which you can only spend on 'poorly drawn giraffes' and other stuff of that nature.

Or some way to test if your bid would be the highest bid before you commit to buying the credits (that would defeat some of the advantages of a proxy bid though, because it would allow people to figure out the real high bid).

Also, it is good practice to make it as easy to do a refund as it is to sign up.

I know ebay does proxy bidding, I've bought plenty of stuff on ebay, but I pay after winning the bid. My obligation to pay starts with the bid, but I'm not required to pay until winning the auction, my card is not charged until after the auction closes.

The scenario to go through is the one where a new user of your system buys enough credits to pay for the item that he/she is interested in. Only to find after going through all that that the amount is not high enough and that you need to buy still more credits (but not how many) in order to place a successful bid. You can't really do that imho, it feels like you're being taken for a ride.

That request for a refund should be in your inbox.

Although I know about proxy style auctions work, I was also a little shocked by the suddenness of the

Enter the bid amount... OK. Buy points... OOK. Enter credit card... OOOOK. You're about to bid... OMG OMG OMG! Are you sure you want to bid?... Yes! Yes! Yes! Oh, sorry, you've been outbid. Granted, this made me run for the PayPal link ;)

I think a wording change should be enough for people who don't know how proxy bidding works. Instead of saying "Current bid", say "Second highest bid [?]" (with the [?] being a link). When someone clicks on it, explain how proxy style auctions work in very plain terms. Ditto for the "Your max bid" - say "Maximum you're willing to bid [?]".

I'd also suggest a slight UX change: maybe slow down the process a little so that you can see "You've bid 200 points! Comparing bids... you've been outbid.

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