When you bid early, you don’t reveal your price. Rather, a successful bid reveals the price of the 2nd highest bidder because eBay is effectively a Second price auction though many people seem unaware of it. It is, in effect a 2nd price auction where some bidders, if they wish to, can take the risk their bids will be revealed ahead of time by another, higher early bidder.

Seen this way, it is hard to imagine what the sense of early bidding is. Largely it seems to come about because eBay’s system encourages people to confuse their actions with the familiar English auction that is done by live auctioneers, with the going, going, gone.

However, as much as you might like an English Auction, eBay simply is not that. It has differences from a standard Vrickey second price auction, and those differences confuse people, but in the end that’s what it is, and if you don’t treat it as one, you are going to get frustrated.

eBay could of course decide to offer English Auctions and see if sellers choose to use them. They are more “fun” though they consume more time. If buyers demand English auctions then sellers might well decide to use them to get more buyers, because no matter what bias your auction system introduces, having more bidders is almost always better for the seller.