Question about Auctions

I have a question for those of you who might have some familiarity with online gun auctions. I'm not talking about the Gunbroker type -- I mean the online bidding services for live auctions: stuff like Proxibid and LiveAuction.

I'm looking at a shotgun, and it shows up listed on one service with a current bid of $50 and four days until the auction goes live. (Not exactly a high-end item, but a funky old gun that has nostalgic appeal to me.) Through another service, I find the exact same gun listed with a current bid of $130. Huh? I'm sure it's the same gun -- exactly the same pictures, specs, year of manufacture, city where the auction is happening, time until live auction starts, everything. I went back and forth in real time, and one still said $50 while the other said $130.

What gives? I put in a bid on the lower-priced listing, and it says I'm the leading bidder, but I'm still considerably short of the "current bid" on the other listing. Has anybody experienced this before? Is this normal? Do they periodically reconcile the bids from various listing services, meaning that I'm going to be outbid shortly? I'd appreciate whatever light anybody could shed on this.

Thanks, everyone, for the input. The listing service where I put in my bid is one that used before, just one time. That time, I won the item I was bidding on and the transaction went smoothly. It's a bidding service that works with various auction houses, and this auction is from a different auction house than the last one. Maybe they're the ones that aren't playing by the rules.

I'm going to keep my eye on the situation and give them a call. If I don't get a satisfactory answer, I may withdraw my bid.

deere140 said:

Since it sounds like an online and live auction, the high bid between the three sources wins. If web A is at 50 and web B is at 150 then the live auction will call for 175 or so. If no one bids at the live auction then the web B of 150 would win. I have not heard of two web site sources, but it is common to collect bids from absentee, web, phone and live. The live usually opens at an increment above the highest of all sources.

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That makes sense, but if I'm Web A and Web B has a higher bid, why would it say that I'm currently the high bidder? That's what's confusing me

wiscoaster said:

Can you do that? On Gunbroker, you make a bid - you're committed.

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They charge a penalty for a withdrawn bid. I think it's OK as long as I do it before the live auction opens. Then they just open the live auction at a lower price -- whatever the bid next below mine was, I think.

Well, the shotgun went for $170 to a live bidder. I didn't check back in until the real-time auction was over. I would never have gone that high anyway.

I'm thinking that they probably list on various bidding services and don't aggregate the bids until the live auction starts. So my "high bid" was only "high" on the one bidding service, and the $130 bid I saw on another service was where they started for the live auction.

Or I could be totally wrong. That has happened before ...

George P said:

Don't forget that you will also be hit for a 20% buyer's premium, plus shipping plus transfer fees in most cases; that can add a lot to the winning bid price.

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True, but this was such a low-dollar item that the premium wouldn't have been too bad. Shipping was through shippingsaint.com, who charge pretty reasonable rates in my past experience. I have a C&R FFL and this was a C&R item, so there wouldn't have been any transfer fees.

Yeah, I'm pretty much a bottom-feeder when it comes to auctions ...