I tried to use Yahoo Auctions Japan for the very first time today. It was a mad rush to try and bid for a crappy RealForce board. I wanted to harvest it for the keycaps and place them into a secondhand RealForce board that I have already (that doesn’t have keycaps).
I’ve never tried this whole bidding thing before, but at the last minute, there’s a chance for you to outbid another person. Then the bidding resets, and you have another 5 minutes added, and the other person can outbid you too. It goes on like that for quite some time.
Personally, I got really excited, and I kept thinking “OK! I can extend my price by another ¥100!” I did this at least 4 times, which means I increased my original bid by ¥800. This counts for the times where the person outbid my bid by ¥100. That’s the minimum you can raise against the other person.
At the end, I decided to stop when the conversion back to Singapore Dollars went beyond what I was willing to pay for, including shipping prices. I thought that I would be willing to try and stretch that by just a little bit more, but thankfully, my common sense got the better of me, and I stopped.
Would I do it again? Sure! But I would set hard caps, and I would also try to buy the item instead of waiting for the bidding. This would be in case someone went into a bidding war, and we would emerge paying a lot more than what the buying price would be.
Try at your own risk: Buyee.jp to make an account with Tenso as well, and they will help to translate the terms you are searching for. Very exciting stuff, and you can find some real gems inside.