How To Bid At AuctionsYou are allowed to come early to look at the merchandise and inspect it. Some larger items, such as farm implements will allow you to come a day in advance. The usual time is a couple of hours. Early inspection is critical part of knowing how to bid! The purpose of early inspection is for you to get the best price for the best merchandise. It doesn’t matter if you are buying for yourself or buying to resell. What does matter is that you know how to bid so you want waste money. If you are looking for collector items or antiques, knowing how to bid takes on a new meaning. Take along one of the books about collectables or antiques them with the pictures so you will know if you are looking at something worth some big bucks. You can get these books at your local bookstore. Just look for books about collectables and antiques. I once went to an auction in a small town that had some antiques and a mixture of used items. I was going through the early inspection when I came upon some vases. I recognized one of the vases as a Roseville pottery piece. I was looking for items to sell on eBay at the time and was sure the bid would go too high. But to my surprise I was the high bidder at $38.00. I new it was worth around $100.00 so I was extremely happy. The vase was placed on eBay and sold for around $75.00 the next week. Yes, I could have held on to it and got more money, but you will find if you do any selling of the items you buy, that you will sell more by giving the buyer a good deal also.Whether they are held indoors or out, there will be an area set up for registration. It’s a simple of matter of giving them some information about yourself and letting them know your sales tax number if you have one. They will in turn give you a bidder number. This is usually on a card approximately 10 inches tall and about 3 inches wide with your bidder number written with a large black marker. Once you register you are "just a number" until time to pay of course! The way the bidding works depends on the value of the merchandise. For instance, if the caller is auctioning off a diamond ring, they are going to probably use increments of $25.00 to $100.00. But if the auctioneer is auctioning off a pocket knife, they will probably start the bid at $5.00 and go up increments of 50 cents to $1.00 at a time. As the auctioneer calls out the amount he is trying to get for the next bid, if you want to bid you hold up your bidders card or hand in the air and he or one of the spotters will acknowledge your bid. The caller will keep raising the price until finally no one is bidding and then say the words: “going once, going twice, sold to bidder number ______." The auctioneer has several helpers. The ones you will see most are the spotters who stand out amongst the bidders and yell if they see someone bidding. The auctioneers can’t possibly see everyone in the room so therefore good spotters are a must. The other person you usually don’t see is someone who keeps a log of who is the winning bidder on which items. When you get the winning bid, the log keeper writes down the item description and your bidder’s number beside it. When you bid on the item, you held up your card and the auctioneer gave the number to the log keeper.Now you are ready to attend an auction for real. But first check out merchandise pickup. Knowing what to do here is important. Fun ones to start out on are the weekly auctions in your town or the storage building auctions. If you are going to sell online you will want to check this out.
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