Auctions are 90% bad deals because you often end up with someone getting over excited and bidding more than the next buy me now price for the same product. But 10% of the time you get lucky, particularly if auctions end at odd time of the day. So I find it's worth throwing some bids, knowing that you should almost always lose. Ebay is best when you are not in a hurry and happy to wait for the right bargain.

I mean, an auction is something where you "win" by agreeing to pay more than anyone else. It's always going to be a bad deal for the buyer. The key with Ebay is to actually sell stuff on there too. If you're just a consumer you'll lose out on auctions in the long run.

> It's always going to be a bad deal for the buyer.

That's not true. Sometimes there's not a lot of demand and you pay much less than average market price.

If something is priced super low then someone might step in to arbitrage, but even with perfect knowledge in a perfectly efficient market, an arbitrager will only be willing to pay the true value minus the cost of relisting, the cost of reshipping, the cost of their time, the cost of tying up their money, and the cost of the risk it won't resell. If you beat that by fifty cents you'll get a great deal on the item.

Some items are poorly marketed - in the wrong category, missing a model number, listed as 1MB rather than 1GB, poorly described, poorly photographed etc.

This either limits the number of bidders though worse discoverability or just less desirability and lower prices.

> you often end up with someone getting over excited and bidding more than the next buy me now price for the same product.

I don't find auctions exciting or compelling, so I doubt I'd get overly excited about bidding. I'd just set a max bid (probably about half what I would expect to pay with "buy it now", to compensate for the extra delays and hassle involved with auctions) and call it good. If I'm outbid, I'd just do the straight purchase like I would have anyway.

The reason that unnoticed auctions might be worth me looking at is to expand the pool of possible sellers to buy from. Although if my bid makes the auction suddenly attract the attention of automated bidders/snipers, then there's no point to it for me. This might be a nonstarter.

I'll probably give it a try and see how it goes, though.

Ebay has filters to display sold listings, so when you're looking to buy something, check out the closed auctions and see what they're going for. If the prices are similar, you might as well buy from fixed-price listings, but if auction prices are lower, you can save a lot by being patient.

You can also save searches for a fixed-priced listing below a specified value, and enable alerts, so that if someone lists something that's priced to sell, you can get it quickly.

Slightly misspelled or otherwise poorly listed items, and check auctions for “ending soonest” at awkward hours.