I put some bids in on the Keith Traveller mss. last night, and ran into some odd behavior on eBay for the first time:

- I put in bids on all 5 mss.
- all of the mss. had minimum bids of $50 with various different BINs
- the first three of my bids were placed at the minimum amount, and the reserve was not yet met
- my last two bids were placed at the reserve amount, but higher than the minimum bids on the auctions:  this was very confusing to me, since I thought that the bids should have been entered at the minimum bid level (and would raise when I was outbid by someone who cares more about Traveller than I do )

The net-net of the latter was that my bids were entered but were raised to be higher than the minimum bid on the last 2 items.  

Is this a change in eBay behavior from your collective POVs?  According to eBay, it's working as designed, but I haven't bumped into this reserve vs. min bid behavior before, and thought I should check-in for your expert opinions!

I think the way it works in the UK is that if you put in a bid of £60 and the minimum is £5, you'll bid that minimum so long as the reserve price is higher than £60, and you get a 'reserve not met' message. But if the reserve is £50, your bid goes in at £50 and you are the first person to have met the reserve price. It's been that way in the UK for a long time. The reason I picked such high figures in the example is that in the UK the minimum reserve price is £50.

That would seem to concur with the what you've described.

Thanks guys:  I hadn't run into this before, was very puzzling to me (and, is still not very intuitive/user friendly IMO )