I bought an item on ebay the other day. During the last few seconds 2 people tried to snipe it.
They didn’t get it 
.
But it leads me to the conclusion that I have to know how to be a good sniper just to keep from getting screwed.
Sooo
Is there a way to set an external clock to ebay time?
I’ve tried sniping but I can sometimes be a minute and a half off. Not close enough to my way of thinking.
“Sniping”? I think you mean outbidding someone at the very last minute (forgive me if I’m wrong.) All you have to do is enter the maximum amount that you’re willing to pay for the item and eBay will bid for you. It’s called proxy bidding.
Yeah I know about proxy bidding but sometimes I like to get a bargain too.
I’ve held the high bid for up to 2 days and then had someone grab it in the last few seconds.
The people that tried to snipe the item yesterday tried in the last few seconds. It cost me $3.00.
All I do is figure out the current ebay time by refreshing an auction page that’s about to end (subtract the time remaining from the ending time) and synchronize the time with a digital watch. Then wait until 10-20 seconds before auction close (maybe 30 seconds if the Net’s a bit laggy) and place the bid.
There are also programs that will snipe for you automatically, but I find that rather cheesy…
There are actually online sevices that will snipe an auction for you. Try auctionsniper.com for a start. It’s a free one that will place a bid in the last seconds of an aution. Good luck!
i love snipes when i’m selling something on ebay, hate them when i’m a bidder. take the good with the bad, i guess.
when i’m bidding, i have 2 windows open: one with the item and my next bid already entered and waiting for me to submit; the other window with the main item page that i refresh to watch the time tick down (and watch the hit counter go up if they have one - a clue that someone else may be watching the item as well), as well as see new bids in the final few seconds.
A seller can close an auction early if they want to. I can imagine no sniping then.
Can someone please explain to me what the point of sniping is? If you enter your maximum bid that you’re willing to pay for something, and someone outbids you, then by definition the price went higher than you were willing to pay. Is there a problem with this?
I guess the only downside I can see is that it wasted more of your time, whereas if the sniper had entered a proxy bid ahead of time, you could have seen that you were outbid and gone on with your life.
From what I can tell, sniping itself makes no sense, and getting upset at sniping doesn’t make sense. Am I missing something?
Why would a seller want to close an auction early?
Closed early = fewer bids = lower final value = bad for the seller
Am I missing something?
It’s more psychological than anything else. Some people (for whatever reason; maybe they don’t really understand proxy bidding) prefer to put in a bid that’s just over the current high bid (sometimes, if you look at an auction’s history, you’ll see someone put in 10 or 12 bids, one right after another - they’re trying to just top the last person’s max bid). If you snipe, you’re preventing people like that from bidding up the auction, at least, from bidding it up against your max bid.
When I snipe, I do it once per auction, manually, with my max (proxy) bid; I generally wait until the last 10 seconds and don’t play games with bidding multiple times. Most other auction sites prevent snipers by extending the auction’s closing time if a bid is received in the last n minutes, making it more like a real (live) auction. Of coure, eBay is the standard against which all other auction sites are compared, so if they don’t feel it will improve their bottom line, they won’t implement it.
Fear Itself, it is rarely in a sellers best interest to close an auction early to eliminate sniping. I have no idea what Handy’s point was.
CurtC:
In theory, no. But here, allow me to paint you an example:
Let’s say I put in $5.00 as my maximum bid on an item. Now in theory, that says I wouldn’t be willing to pay $5.01. However, in reality, no one would balk at paying an extra penny, an extra dime…perhaps not even an extra quarter. What the bid of $5.00 really means is that he wouldn’t want to pay $5.50 or $6.00 for the item.
Now, currently, my high bid is at $3.00, and I feel comfortable that I’ve got a $2.00 cushion. Ebay will allow another bidder to offer anything over $3.50. If anyone comes along and places a bid of at least $3.50, eBay will weigh it against my high bid and the higher of the two wins.
His last-minute high bid of $5.01 (he’s probably guessing that my high bid is $5.00) beats my high bid of $5.00.
That, quite simply, sucks.
Ever since I discovered snipers, I make sure to tack an odd number of cents after the “even” amount of my high bid. That way, they’d generally have to guess at least a full dollar above my “even” high bid to beat me rather than get away with the cheap shot.
The point is you want to pay as little as possible. I don’t like eBay as I have found sellers use sniping to up their final price.
I have a bid for One dollar on something.My max is $5. If you investigate you will find often at the last minute you get an outrageous bid to up the price. This is made by a shrill bidder. Usually the seller. He bids a ridiculous amount of say $50 thus it forces up the price.
This way the seller doesn’t have to sell the item for only a dollar. He then says the winner didn’t pay doesn’t have to pay the commission and boom the item is relisted.
I have gotten a lot of people reported just by following it. You can see how often this happens.
cmkeller, why wouldn’t you put the maximum amount you’re willing to pay as your bid? In the example you gave, if you had put in $5.25 as your highest, wouldn’t that solve the problem?
I don’t see why you would love snipes when you are selling. It might be mildly gratifying to get a little extra at the last second but if the auction was extended after a “snipe” then there is a chance that the person previously in the high spot would bid again. The sniper is trying to outbid without getting into a competition that would be to the seller’s benefit.
I love snipes as a seller too. I would rather someone come along at the last second and bid $35 on something that had been sitting at $30 all week. As I bidder, I always snipe. True, proxy bidding works, however I bid on things that often have a lot of competition. If I bid $50 three days before the end of the auction when the item is still sitting at $30, 9 times out of 10 someone will come along and go over my $50. If i leave it till the end, I have a better chance - or so I feel. I have gotten some incredible deals, but when something is an item I have to have, I’ll snipe it.
You are not alone, my friend.
One thing that makes sniping annoying is when the sniper loses. As an example, I once was winning an auction for an item at about $60. However, I had set a maximum bid of $110. I was convinced I was getting a pretty spiffy bargain. At the last second, a sniper came and bid $85. Result? My proxy bid automatically jumped to $86. Bastard 
As a seller, let me also add that sniping has an addition problem, which I have now had happen twice:
Sniper comes in at the last minute and beats out a legit bidder. You e-mail the sniper telling him/ her they won. They meanwhile, have set up a new account linked to hotmail and have sniped numerous items and only respond to the ones they want. You report the problem, and the sniper just opens another new account and starts over.
Meanwhile, you contact the high bidder who got sniped who isn’t interested because A) he’s already bidding on another auction for the same item, or B) is pissed at you because he’s convinced you used a shill bidder as was described above.
Sniping is great as long as the sniper, after being a jerk to the other bidders, isn’t a jerk to the seller…
Quoth Markxxx:
Doesn’t Ebay let sellers set a minimum price to begin with?
Recently, ebay made it more difficult to open up a new account after you’ve been banned, by requiring credit card and bank account info (there was a thread here about this a week or two ago). So what Yarster mentioned is probably not that big a problem.