Enter eBay’s new Bid Assistant. With Bid Assistant, you can bid on a series of auctions, and your bid will remain live until you win one of them or until there are no more auctions in the list of auctions that you supply to Bid Assistant.
Since you supply a single maximum bid amount for all the auctions in the group that you bid on using Bid Assistant, the most common-sense use of Bid Assistant is to help you to bid on multiple auctions for the same time of item until you win one of them. For example, if you’re determined to get that Palm Treo we mentioned earlier and are willing to pay $150 for it, you can use Bid Assistant to increase your chances of winning one at that price by following these steps:
- Search for the Palm Treo model you want using the standard eBay search system.
- For each auction that you would consider bidding on, add the item to your watch list in My eBay.
- Visit My eBay by clicking on the My eBay link at the top of any eBay website page and scroll down to the “Items I’m Watching” category.
- Check the box next to each auction you’d like to bid on with Bid Assistant.
- Click on the “Bid with Bid Assistant” button near the bottom of the “Items I’m Watching” category.
- On the next page, when asked, enter your maximum bid price for each item in the list, or enter a total in the box on the right side of the screen to bid on all of them with the same price.
- Click Continue at the bottom of the page to confirm your bid(s) and make them live.
Once you confirm your bids, Bid Assistant will do the hard work of monitoring and bidding on auctions for you until you win one of the items in the list. Bid Assistant will arrange the list into chronological order—those auctions that end first will be bid on first and vice-versa. Bid Assistant will continue to bid for you until no more items remain or until you win one of the auctions in your list, whichever happens first.
