Car Hunting on EBay, This Deal Just Clicked

On the opposite end of the equation, some sellers advertise -- usually with capital letters and several exclamation points -- no reserve, which means the bidder with the highest offer at the end of the auction gets the car, even if the final offer is low. But most sellers set a reserve, or minimum price, that is unknown to buyers, so if the auction doesn't catch fire, there's no sale. And then there's a hybrid option in which there's an auction as well as a "buy it now" price.

Whoa, I thought one day, making my daily online rounds and spying "my" car, a 2001 Saab in purportedly flawless condition, 40,000 miles -- not fantastic, but not bad -- and at only $13,000, with two days to go in the auction. Okay, so the car was in Pennsylvania. I could figure something out, I reasoned.

I jumped. Count me in, up to $13,500, I wagered. I waited. For a couple of hours, no higher bids appeared. Could it be this easy?

Yeah, right, as my 3-year-old friend would say. Not a chance. When I returned to my keyboard a few hours later, my bid had been buried by offers that climbed thousands of dollars higher, the victim of an essentially efficient market.

Sure, you may get those vintage jelly-jar glasses for a steal in another wing of the eBay colossus, but it isn't going to happen with a purchase that has as large a buying audience -- and so much money at stake -- as a car. There are thousands of people trolling the same listings, looking for the same bargain. That means the drop-dead bargain doesn't exist. Look at it this way: Why on earth would a retailer accept a substantially lower price online for a car that he could get from a customer who had walked into his showroom?

All the same, that car ended up selling for a good price -- as it turned out, the lowest price I saw for a comparable vehicle, probably $2,500 to $3,000 less than it would have sold for at a Washington area dealership.

Sure, I knew, in my brain if not my heart, that finding a fantastic deal was highly unlikely. Still, I tried two other eBay auctions, with the same distinct lack of success. It took a lot of mental energy, as auctions stretched over days, and most of the final selling prices seemed to eerily resemble the prices I had seen advertised in showrooms.

And then I found Lenny. Or, rather, I saw a car listed that looked like "mine." This one had a "buy it now" price, which was considerably less than others of its type and was only a couple of thousand dollars more than the latest bid. The auction had a long way to go, and the bids would probably eventually reach the same level as the "buy it now" price.

In other words, I could save a lot of time and effort by acting now, as they say on TV. It would be like losing the crowd by riding the elevator all the way to the top, rather than taking the stairs with everyone else, step by step, and hoping to win the race.

But I'd never seen the car in person, much less driven it. And there was the fact that it was in New Jersey, and I was in Washington. Come to think of it, the whole notion of spending many thousands of dollars on a car, sight unseen, tires unkicked, was pretty outlandish. So I picked up the phone and called Lenny.

The dealership's phone number was at the bottom of the listing. Actually, it wasn't a retail dealership, but a wholesale operation, as the guy who answered -- that would be Lenny -- explained. Wholesalers buy cars at to-the-trade auctions and then resell them to retailers. Some also "flip" cars to individual buyers.

It made sense to me. And these guys didn't tack on the fees I had seen nearly everywhere else, both in online auctions and at dealerships: $150, $200, even $300 for "documentation" costs. Nuisance fees, it seemed to me, like paying them to sell you their car. I liked that Lenny didn't do that.