A Swanky New (Read: OLD) Rug for the Ranch; or - How to Win at eBay Auctions More Often that You Lose.

The rug, as seen on eBay

The house needs some color splashes here and there, and I've been keeping an eye on Craigslist, Bisman (our local online free ad), Etsy, and eBay. With any of this mid century stuff, if you've begun collecting in the post-Madmen era, you know that the prices have gone up steadily. There are a few ways to combat this. One is to have patience, scour your online and in-print ads, and hit your local thrifts *every* *SINGLE* *WEEK*. I've seen some pretty cool stuff in and around Minot at thrifts, junk sales, flea markets, and yard sales. Man, do I miss the Long Beach Flea Market. I have found some great stuff here, though. Just not the kind of rugs that we're after. You would think that there would be some here - they are a Scandanavian art form after all...



If you're slightly less patient, and don't want to wait years for your prey, then what you can do is set up recurring searches on Craigslist or on eBay. Next time you're on fleapay searching for 'orange and green furry fondue set', or a pair of 'his and hers mid century teak backscratchers', take note of tick boxes around the page that will help to narrow down the results that you get back. There are some good tools there. One that has helped me find numerous 'deals' time and time again is the Follow This Search button right at the top of the search results. Don't click that yet though. If you do, you'll get search results that include every single set of his and hers teak backscratchers on the 'bay. I've found that the best deals on any collectible vintage items will generally be had on items that are in an active auction. So when I set up my recurring searches, I usually tick the Auction tab first. Here's the neat thing - any search refinements that you make to your search are saved in your recurring search. So the search results that eBay sends you each day (or however often you set up your email notifications) will only have items in an auction. Once you have your searches set up, you just have to read your email instead of running a new search for each item every day. I have around 30 saved searches with common terms for the items I'm looking for, and sometimes, even common misspellings of items I'm looking for. That square laurel lamp in the First Month's Changes posting... I got an *AMAZING* deal on that because Laurel was misspelled 'Laruel'. Guess what? After the first bid on an item, the seller cannot change the listing title. Which means that most of the people that are looking for that item will not even get a chance to see it.

About a week ago, in my recurring search morning coffee-email-review session, I saw this rug. I was immediately struck by the strong colors, the geometric swirl pattern, the great condition, and the intact tags. Onto my watchlist it went. It had, apparently, originally had a 'buy iy now' price, but once the first bid is put in, the 'buy it now' option goes into the toilet. The first time I saw it, it had a bid of $51 bucks on it, so I have no idea what the buy it now price was.

I checked once (or maybe twice) a day to see how the bidding was going. I expected that with such a strong design, this one would go pretty high. If you've ever watched Rya rugs on eBay, you probably know a couple of things. 1) Many, if not MOST, of the rugs touted as Rya's are not. 2) The folks that generally specialize in Rya's generally do not put their rugs up for auction. And 3), the handful of nice (strong colors, strong design elements) actual Rya's that sell generally fetch equally strong prices. This leads me to another point - do your research if you're after something on eBay - use the 'sold items' search refinement to see what similar items have sold for. This will give you an idea of what your competitors for an item might be expected to pay for what you're looking to buy. So I was expecting this one to go for a pretty high price. I set my upper limit (*NEVER* forget to set the limit of what you're willing to pay for an item before you ever start bidding - and when you reach that limit, walk away!), and bided my time. And waited, and waited. And waited.

This morning, the rug was up to $71 bucks. I knew there were a lot of watchers, and so I suspected there would be a lot of last minute sniping. You know, when you've bid, but maybe not quite high enough and during the last 5 seconds someone puts a bid in that's higher than yours and you end up swearing at your computer screen and stomping around in a circle like a small, spoiled child? Been there, done that. That's why for those one-of-a-kind items that might not come along again in a few years, I tend to set my bidding upper limit a bit higher. With 2 hours to go I put in a small bid to test the seriousness of the current high bidder. To my surprise, I was the high bidder just by bidding 2 bucks more.  Hmm.

With these high-interest, high-watchcount items, don't plan on doing anything but watching for your opportunity for the last 10 minutes of the auction - that's usually when all of the action takes place. Someone bid up to 80 bucks during the last minute. With 40 seconds left it was up to $105. I kept my cool. There was one more bid - maybe to $120, and then with 7 seconds left, I pressed my bid button with my firm upper limit as my bid (if you do this, make sure you are signed in, and have the bid window open, and have your bid amount typed in - eBay can take a few seconds to process your bid). Bids flew like crazy in the final 3 or 4 seconds. But I walked away with the rug for fully half of my upper limit.

A good day.