Snooping on Contending Bidders in Online Sales

First things first, if you don’t like getting run up, don’t bid on cattle.  I’m not referring to online sales or live sales.  I’m referring to cattle sales.  There are people that won't run you (I never did on ours) but in general it's naive to think you aren’t going to be run if you are bidding in a cattle sale.  Bid what you are willing to pay and let the chips fall where they will.

However, if you ARE concerned with getting run in an online sale, how can you tell if you’re bidding against an actual person interested in the animal or getting run up?

There’s obviously no sure fire way to do it but there are things you can do to get a lot clearer picture of what is going on.

It starts with the fact that you can view the buyer numbers for individual bids across all of the online bidding sites.  You won't know who the person is but you can see what they’ve bid on and how much they've bid.

For example, if somebody is willing to bid $50k+ for an animal, personally, I don’t believe for a second that they’re going to get out bid on a $3,500 heifer in the same sale.  If a buyer is repeatedly the contending bidder on cattle and doesn’t actually buy one, that’s a strong indication to me that they’re not a legitimate bidder.

Another thing you can do is a site search on Google for the buyer number.

Let’s say somebody is “12345” and you want some indications as to whether you’re bidding against a person, the seller trying to get more money, or somebody trying to make an animal look like it sold for a lot more money than it actually did in order to promote it, the sire, or the operation.

Search for the term “site:[salecompanyurl]” along with that buyer number.  Google will typically pull up the sales that buyer number has bid in on that system, whether that be BWOS, CW, SC, SB, etc.

Does somebody have a tendency to bid on cattle that have absolutely nothing to do with each other?

Is it somebody buying cattle in Illinois who was also using the buyer number for good but not "haul across the nation good" barrows in California?

Is it somebody that repeatedly comes in second high bid but doesn’t win any of the sales?

All of those are strong indicators to me that you might not be bidding against a legitimate buyer.