The idea of a closing date is just that a date. The idea of a closing time can be just that or extended if a bid is received in the last few minutes of the auciton.

http://www.egghead.com

is a site that uses the extended time on auctions that receive bids in the last 5 minutes.

I have to admit that online aucitons are slightly different than being at a live auction with a live auctioneer.

At the live auction have we ever seen an auctioneer accept a bid and directly said "SOLD"? I haven't.

The live auction isn't over till the auctioneer gives all the bidders proper warning, "going once, going twice,,,, SOLD!"

In the case of the E-bay auction, the SOLD Hammer comes down at exactly the time specified by the software.

So if, on E-bay for example, the current bid is $340.00 which that bidder would have willing paid $500.00 but didn't place their maximum bid there, and my acutal last second snipe bid is $500.00 and the actual final bid the computer software see's let say is $350.00 , the seller still doesn't get the price I was willing to pay or the other bidders maximum, since I sniped the auction at the last second.

On the other hand, the bid could have went for $500.00 if the current high bidder had placed that as their maximum(yet the current high bid is $340.00) and my bid would be out since their bid was the first made at that maximum.

On the other front, having the seller end their auction when they feel they have a high enough bid? I guess there is no auction here. Just a seller and a buyer.

I think we all agree that an auction with extended bidding times can cause some people to get caught up in a bidding frenzy.

Some of us authors rely somewhat on the online auctions for prices in our guides, however, I am sure most of us weight the final auction prices and don't wholeheartedly rely on them. We must remember that many of the collectors are not on line. And those collectors who are online may already have the item in their collections and aren't willing to bid very high or at all on the auction.

I've noted this somewhat with the silver strikes. The new tokens showing up bring higher prices than those same pieces showing up day's, weeks or months later. It's probably not that the price isn't really higher, the potential online buyers already have them.

Katie, one note regarding the car dealership. I've helped myself and several people at work purchase their new cars from dealerships who are online. It's really surprising how much lower we were able to find the prices by submitting online requests directly to them and have them come back with prices. These online Dealerships have even beat out the online services who qoute you a price on almost any make/model car. They've even soundly beat out 3 of our Credit Union car buying services. We only go to the dealerships to test drive the cars we were looking at, and the prices the salesmen were quoting us were absurd to say the least. MOST FUNNY was the one dealer who had online services where we did a test drive and the quote between the Salesman and the Online quote was $3,000.00+ lower!