I'm fairly staid and boring when it comes to eBay. I determine the maximum that I'd be willing to bid, and I bid that. If it goes above that, I reconsider whether the item is worth more to me. If it is, I'll decide on a new maximum and bid that. I don't do last minute bidding in most cases.

I'm with ray on this one.

I've bought some horse stuff and am bidding on a swimsuit for my daughter right now.

I've also bought some tickets to a horse shindig for $8 and sold them on a local online classifieds for $30 each.

I've purchased a lot of bicycle parts and even a frame on ebay.  I've sold a few items.  I never purchase anything at the "buy it now" price.  As others have mentioned, I'll set my max bid and stick to that.  If somebody outbids me, I expect I can find an indentical item in a few days.

I decide in advance what my maximum bid will be - and I pick a weird number like $22.43 just so I'm not outbid by 2 cents - and then I walk away. If I hover those last minutes, I'm tempted to go higher than my maximum bid.

I've bought a Bernina sewing machine, an SLR Canon Rebel camera (those are a fantastic deal now that everyone's going digital, and they're a decent entry-level SLR), about $1000 in china (my inheritance from my grandma, she specified I get something "nice") and son1 got a katana off eBay for Christmas.

Still using my Nikon SLR.  When I get the film developed, for an extra $2 I also get a CD with all the photos in digital format.  And film is dirt cheap these days.  I'll only switch when I can get a good deal on a digital SLR so I can still use my lenses.  The entry-level D80 is still around $700 just for the camera body.  That will pay for a whole lot of film and developing. 

Recently I learned that eBay is a good source for genealogy goodies. For example, I just received a cd of an 1854 history of Jefferson county, New York. People are scanning many of the old, valuable, but hard to get materials and offering a digital version of them. This is very helpful, and obviously the copyright has long since expired. (Did you know that we can thank Noah Webster for our American copyright laws? He campaigned hard for them.)

A couple of years ago I bought American Girl dolls and furniture and things for my granddaughters. eBay can be a lot of fun, but my only strategy for buying there is to keep my offer within budget.

Didn't think of it myself -- read about it in a genealogy magazine. Lots of good stuff there. I paid about ten bucks for the cd I got, which is wonderful - good stories so far. Haven't reached many names yet.

Some of the titles offered are going for more, but some of them have been OCRed so that the text is searchable and therefore I think the extra cost would be worth it. Mine isn't searchable -- it just a graphic of each page.

One good story is that in the earliest days of one community the "liberty path" for the jail went around the whole community. Apparently they let the prisoners out to take walks. The catch was in this community, they were subject to additional fines or time if they left the path at all, and detouring around a mudpuddle or a stack of lumber left on the path was not excused.

I also found it interesting that big land dealers bought an enormous area in northern New York, planning to sell tracts to Frenchmen - and set out in 1792 to do so. Unfortunately for the land dealers, the French were preoccupied with their Revolution then.

On the original question, I bid with my highest bid at the last possible second--or I try to put in a weird bid--like instead of bidding $10 for something, I bid something like $10.07. That way a competing bidder might bid $10 even and not get it and then think that the bidding is going to high. I works for me a lot of the time--either that or I'm bidding too high anyway.

I do the samething as Smaug does.

Sweet.

gut a piano? I wish we had a piano...

anyway, I totally bought a text book for $60 on ebay, when I would have had to pay $143 at the Bookstore! Actually, I spent the $143 so I could do the first homework assignment and returned it the next day because I found it cheaper online. I bought 2 of my other books at the Bookstore though, so they can't be that mad, can they?