On 50.5% of the basketball break lots over $25 that we tracked, the runner-up's top bid was within 10% of the winning price. More than half of all underbidders left the show without buying anything.
During a live auction Whatnot shows who is currently winning and at what price. We recorded the highest price each bidder was winning at on each lot, and when the lot sold, every bidder other than the winner became an underbidder for that lot. The runner-up is the underbidder with the highest of those bids. We have this for 9,514 lots across 59 basketball shows, 88.6% as many lots as we have sales for.
Two cautions. A bidder's recorded bid is the highest price they were shown as winning at, which can be lower than the most they were willing to pay, so how close the runner-up came is, if anything, understated. And we excluded 53 losing bids recorded above the sale price as capture errors.
The median lot had 2 losing bidders. The runner-up's top bid was a median 86.7% of the winning price, and the median gap between winner and runner-up was $10.
| Lots | Runner-up within 10% of winner | |
|---|---|---|
| All lots with a losing bid | 9,514 | 3,904 (41.0%) |
| Lots that sold for $25+ | 6,486 | 3,278 (50.5%) |
On cheap lots, a single bid increment is a large share of the price, so "within 10%" is harder to hit. On lots that sold for $25 or more, the runner-up was within 10% of the winner on 50.5% of lots. Half the time, on lots that matter, someone else in the room wanted that spot at almost the same price.
Counting each bidder once per show, we saw 3,949 underbidders. Of those, 2,241 (56.7%) did not buy a single lot in that show. The median show had 27 of these bid-but-never-bought people, out of 51 underbidders in total.
Many were small bids: the median peak bid among non-buyers was $10. But 965 of them had bid $25 or more on some lot and still left with nothing. Runner-up bids placed by people who bought nothing in that show added up to $176,645 across the sample. Those lots still sold to someone else, so this is not lost revenue. It is demand that walked away unserved.
(Matching underbidders to buyers is by display name, so it is best effort.)
Underbidders who keep coming close are candidates to become regular buyers. Our top buyers page shows how much a few of those can matter.
Every figure on this page comes from 59 basketball breaks from 17 Whatnot sellers that Whaler tracked from September 9 to September 29, 2026 (7 capture days): 10,734 sold lots, 1,530 buyers and $1,824,913 in captured sales. Each lot is one sold spot or item with its final price and buyer. These are the breaks we tracked, not the whole Whatnot market, so treat them as benchmarks from real basketball shows rather than platform-wide averages.
Captured totals are lower bounds: a capture can start after a show begins or stop before it ends. Medians are used throughout because a handful of very large shows and buyers pull averages up. Sample sizes are stated next to each number.
Whaler records the runner-up on every lot in your Whatnot show, so the bidders who came close are not forgotten when the stream ends.