I just got an email, announcing that I had “won” an auction on some worthless piece of junk that I never bid on. My question: IS EBAY cheat-proof? Suppose somebody steals your ebay info, and starts entering auctions using your (purloined data)-how would EBAY know? Also, what’s to stop people from stealing from your ebay account?
Has this ever happened to you?
If someone gets ahold of your password (or guesses it) then they can do whatever they want with your account. The only way to stop them is to contact eBay and get them to cancel your account.
As for the email you got, it’s likely just some scamspam which would give you a link to “pay” for your item by entering your credit card details on some nefarious website.
/hijack
Maybe the email is a scam-type email? I’d make sure it wasn’t first, then figure out where to go from there.
I believe the sniping software is cheating.
But that’s just me.
Sniping software isn’t cheating because it doesn’t really accomplish anything. I’ve gotten into this debate many times, but I still can’t see any reason to snipe when you can just enter a single bid for the maximum you’re willing to pay.
I agree with you there. If you’re using sniping software to bid more than what you would have put in for the automatic bidding option, then you’re overpaying.
Try the usenet group alt.marketing.online.ebay
Unlike most usenet this group is good and pretty much spam free. They will answer all your questions. Many, many sellers from eBay there.
Sniping could be considered cheating. eBay clearly forbids the use of automatic or mechanical means to bid. Now are sniping services this? Some say yes. Others no? Obviously eBay knows they exsist and does not go after them. So it’s still a highly debatable point.
Sniping software is actually a bit of a good thing, since it allows people to not be ripped off quite as easily.
There’s a big hole in eBay’s bidding system. The short of it is that a seller with access of multiple accounts can learn your high bid, and through bid cancellations and other underhanded tactics, can make you pay right up to your max bid.
Sniping software prevents this, to a degree.
If you have questions about an email that seems to be eBay related, you can forward the email to spoof@ebay.com. You’ll receive at least one automated reply, and probably one formula letter reply. All of my suspicious looking ebay related letters have, in fact, been spams or scams. I get a lot of emails claiming to be replies to “Question for seller” which are, in fact, simply ads for various auctions. Forwarding these letters to eBay seems to get the auctions pulled pretty quckly. 
My advice would be to avoid clicking on any links, and above all, avoid entering any personal information (CC#, etc.) in reply to these emails, or in any website you may have clicked to.
There’s also a variation of fake eBay scams, where a letter, supposedly from eBay, will arrive in someone’s mailbox. The person is told that for whatever reason, his/her file got corrupted, or the information is out of date, and the person MUST IMMEDIATELY click on this link to “verify” his/her info. Said link, of course, wants a credit card number. If you get a letter like this, and you have any doubts as to whether it’s genuine, just go to eBay by typing in the URL, or by following any legit link you might have. You can check your account status. And again, you should forward the letter to spoof@ebay.com.
These letters usually land in my spam filter, which I can empty with one button push. I generally don’t even open them unless I actually have recently asked a question of a seller lately.
I bid $10.00 on a piece of software with my (high bid) being mistakenly listed as $150.00 ( I made a keying error and added an extra zero and didn’t catch it before it listed). I was the only bidder for most of the auction. Then, in the last few minutes the price was bid all the way up to my maximum. I immediately wrote the seller and Ebay telling them what occured, and that I didn’t want to complete the transaction. However, the seller was insistent saying that he would pursue the matter, ruin my credit, and make complaints against my ISP and my Ebay account, but he did end up settling for $75.00 which I considered further basis for suspicion since there were a series of bids higher than $75.00 which occured during those final minutes (still not a bad deal since the software retailed for about $150.00). Frankly I felt bullied and was somewhat ashamed of myself for not standing up for my position more intensely. Ebay didn’t get involved despite my emailing them and telling them how I made a stupid mistake. To this day I think that the seller somehow “knew” my high bid. I haven’t used Ebay since.
Because people’s “maximum” bids are not necessarily a rock-solid, not-a-penny over limit. It’s a general range.
Example: Let’s say something comes up for bid on Ebay which is generally valued at 100 dollars. I wouldn’t want to pay as much as 60 for it, but 50 sounds about right to me. Now does that mean I wouldn’t be willing to pay 50.01? 50.50? 51.00? 51.01? Not necessarily. People think in round numbers and generalities. They do not tend to calculate their precise upper limit to the penny. Someone who’d pay 50 very likely would be willing to pay 51. But when placing his initial bid, he hadn’t thought of that just yet.
Comes along Mr. Sniper and bids 50.50 with one minute left to the auction. Had I seen my “Ebay Outbid Notice” while there was still time to get in a counter-bid, I very likely would have upped my bid…and I either would have won, or at least forced the other guy to genuinely pay more than I was willing to pay. But the sniper depends on the fact that his last-minute one-upping of the price will not be noticed until it’s too late.
I hate sniping. But if others are doing it, I won’t allow myself to be put at disadvantage.
As long as eBay’s auctions use a fixed ending time, sniping will continue, and it’s definitely not cheating since it is within the rules of making a bid before the auction closes. Automated sniping might be a different issue, but there’s no fool-proof way to distinguish between a manual and an automated bid. Successful bidding is a combination of bid amount and timing. Sniping gives the bidder an advantage in the timing part. When you snipe, you are not disclosing your bid until it is too late for others to react. If you have a single maximum bid in mind, it is obvious that it is better to make the bid at the last second vs. 5 days before the auction ends.
As to real cheating in eBay, someone has already posted how sellers can cheat by having multiple accounts and running up bids (shill bidding). The other way that sellers can “cheat” is by ending auctions early when the bids don’t look too hot. I use quotes because this is not really against eBay rules. Buyers can retract bids also, but only for specific reasons (like entry errors), while sellers can cancel auctions fairly arbitrarily.
I do want to add that in many years of using eBay, my experience has been that the overwhelming majority of buyers and sellers are completely honest and deal fairly in closing transactions.
Just want to clarify that I was not saying that sniping is cheating, I was merely responding to two people who say they don’t see what sniping accomplishes over ordinary bidding.
If eBay considered sniping cheating, they could eliminate it very simply by changing the rule for auction closing. If auctions were kept open as long as there was active bidding (e.g. the auction closes at the posted time OR X minutes after the last bid before closing, whichever is later) then all interested bidders would have what you consider a “fair chance” to increase their existing bids, if they wished.
In fact, many auction houses do exactly that, and eBay itself experimented with it in the early days in the hope of increasing final bids and their commission. It didn’t increase revenues appreciably and buyers didn’t like it. It wasn’t good for people who actually did bid their maximum. Bidders who raised their max in the final moment registered lower satisfaction with their 'bargains". You may think you’d have won if you bid fifty cents more, but that’s an illusion (see below)
The “sniping is cheating” argument is deeply flawed on its own merits. “Sniping” referred to manual last minute bidding long before there were bidding programs. and certainly well before such programs were widespread. Bidders complained just as loudly about it then, with many of the same arguments, when it was solely manual. Yet what do they feel they are being cheated of? The ability to place a (responding) last minute bid themselves!
Imagine, if you will, three very interested bidders on the same auction. Given a fixed closing time, at least one, and probably two, will have sniped (bid without leaving their opponent time to respond) and by your rules “cheated”. You might as well say it’s cheating to NOT use the proxy or raise post facto “non-buyer’s remorse” to the status of a legitimate claim on the product.
Basically, you had every chance to bid your maximum. If someone bids more, they get the item because that’s what an auction is all about. If you sloppily underbid, you lose, because you didn’t think it through [See eBay’s “Checklist for Buyers”]. If you decide, after the auction has closed, “gee, I’d have been willing to pay $0.50 more, if I had known”, that’s just remorse. In a real world auction it is not just legal but often smart to wait until an item is “going, going…” before making your best bid. Every experienced auctioner knows its often foolish to immediately bid to your maximum or instantly raise on being outbid, as the proxy system does
FWIW, you have no reason to believe you’d have gotten it for 50 cents more, anyway. You probably wouldn’t have. Even automated snipers are bidders with their own limits. The maximum bid they entered into their program might have been $5 or $50 more than yours. Without realizing it, you’re wishing you had a chance to “snipe back” and leave THEM no time to respond. They placed a bid that was higher than you said you were willing to pay. What makes you think that they weren’t REALLY willing to pay more than you? Your maximum bid wasn’t known to them. They bid more, and you don’t know if you woulda, coulda, shoulda bid more than they would have been willing to. Under the proxy bidding system, the only way an auction can end at the highest MAX bid, is if one bidder has a max that is 1 bid increment (or less) below the winner. Therefore, if you raise your bid slightly, the most likely outcome is that you will still be outbid; if you raise your bid significantly – well, why would you be any sharper at the last minute than you were when you had all the time in the world to think?
If you use the proxy system, complaints about sniping boil down to a) I’m bad at placing the right bid (and someone else should fix that); or b) an illusory impression of what would have happened, if only you’d bid a little more. You were outbid. Live and learn.
I haven’t read the complete Terms of Service in a long time, and they don’t make it easy to find any passage (if there really is one) that bans automated bidding or sniping. Even their “Search eBay Help” button is greyed out whenever I’ve looked
However, a question in their FAQ explicitly allows using a third-party website to monitor/manage your bids, despite wording in their User Agreement that, on its face, would seem to ban that. Many snipers use exactly such third-party sites to bid, not a program on their home computer. Why? Because not everyone has a reliable OS/system that runs for days without crashing or a reliable unlimited use ISP. MOST people don’t keep their computer on 24/7.
Such sites are explicitly OK according to eBay, and there is no mention of sniping or automated bidding in their help section. Given how strongly people feel about it (and always have - it’s a constant annoyance) I’d expect them to have an entry on it in their Help section to at least discourage it, if they felt it was against their rules
For the record. I have “sniped” maybe ten out of the hundreds of auctions I’ve bid on in the past 5+ years. I don’t have the time to snipe manually, or the inclination to set-up and maintain an automated bid (unless you snipe reasonably often, those programs can be rather unreliable, even with scrupulous updating, because eBay constantly fiddles with their internal network layout, servers and pages so you need to make adjustments in your timing). On the other hand I’ve “been sniped” hundreds of times, like anyone else. I just accept that someone else bid more than I told eBay I was willing to pay. If there was a “problem”, it was mine, not the winning bidder’s.
Interestingly, if you assume perfect sniping is possible then ebay’s auction mechanism becomes strategically identical to the Vickrey auction. In Vickrey auctions, single secret bids are submitted by each bidder, with the winner being the highest bidder but only paying the price of the second-highest bid. The dominant strategy is to bid exactly your personal valuation.
On ebay, if everyone bids right at the last second the bidding becomes effectively secret and one-shot - there is no time to react to the bids of others, so you must just bid what you think the item is worth. As a result of ebay’s proxy bidding system, the price you will pay will be just above the value of the second-highest bid as with the Vickrey auction. Given this, I suspect the only reason ebay doesn’t switch to Vickrey auctions is that explaining second-price auctions to the general public would be nearly impossible since it’s so counter-intuitive. I guess another problem is that the bids would have to be kept secret from the seller until the auction closes, otherwise (s)he could place shills just below the highest bid to artificially increase the final price.
Speaking personally, I don’t bid very often, but I always manually snipe when I do. It’s the dominant strategy - it’d be silly to do otherwise.
A personal story:
I was bidding on a book once. I put in a max bid of $45 on it. Up until the last minute or so, I was winning the auction with the bidding at $25.50 (i.e. next lowest bidder was $25).
Anyway, the winner of the auction got the book for $45.50. So I assumed that someone just outbid me and that’s that.
Within 1 minute (literally) of losing the auction, I got an email from the seller offering me the book at $45, saying the winner didn’t want to pay.
Now I’m not a seller so maybe that stuff happens a lot, but I thought it was pretty damn fishy, especially given the turnaround time on it. I only use “buy it now” now and basically just use Ebay as an online shopping place.
Well, then here’s one my dad called me with:
Dad decided there was something he wanted to buy on ebay.
He goes to ebay, puts in his bid, and notes the date and time the auction would close.
A few minutes – let’s say 30 – before the auction closed, he goes back to that exact item to put in his final bid. Let’s call that my dad’s attempt to snipe and pick up the item. (If I understand this term “sniping” correctly. I’m not much of an ebay-er, since I have a friend in the antique business… I don’t trust any of the sellers, irrational as that may be.)
The item was gone!
He found it, but as a closed auction and the item was not sold.
Dad wanted to know, can a seller do that? I guessed that if a seller had an item on ebay and also had it in his shop, a customer might come in and buy the item for a higher price than the bids the seller was seeing on ebay, so the seller pulled the auction. I think that’s against the rules. If it is, could/should my dad have reported the seller to ebay? Can any experienced ebay users think of something else that might have occurred? Sometimes dads leave out important details, inadvertantly.
Yep, it’s perfectly within the rules to withdraw an item before the end of the auction. No-one’s lost anything except the seller, who forfeits their listing fee.