Sniping also bugs the heck out of us regular bidders, or at least this one. If I’m willing to pay $30, and you’re willing to pay $32, I’ll gladly let you have the item, but I’d rather know sooner rather than at the last second, so that I can give up on that auction and go look for another one.
I don’t see how. Instead of sniping in the last seconds at $30.50, why wouldn’t you just put in your maximum bid of $30.50 a week ago? The result is the same - either you get the item for $30.50, or you don’t.
Note to snipers: if I have the current bid at $30, but the maximum I entered was $50, and you snipe in the last seconds at $30.50, you still lose - I’ll get it at $31.00.
Unless I have missed something in all these discussions, I see absolutely zero value in sniping. Then Munch said “Putting your bid in early is a sure way to get bid against. It’s much smarter to put your max bid in with 1 minute left than with 1 week left,” but contradicted his own post by posting the description from eBay’s own site of what really happens.
You may be interested in reading this paper from Harvard Economics about sniping.
Warning, PDF!
The reason to snipe is that eBay has many brain-dead users. How many times have you seen someone bid on an auction 10 times in a row, just so he can have the maximum bid? This is the sort of person you’re trying to get ahead of by sniping. If you just put in your max bid any time while the auction is running, this person will just keep bidding it up until he’s got the high bid. OTOH, if you wait until the last minute, this hypothetical person would have bid a much lower amount (assuming you and he are the only bidders) and you can snipe him at the last minute by putting in your max bid at 20 seconds to go. The reason for sniping is not technical, it’s psychological. We understand how the proxy system works.
Sniping may work in your favor when there is no high/proxy bid.
Bidding the max as time runs out seems to be the smartest way to go about it. If you bid the max too early you may unintentionally inflate the bidding.
The only value I see in sniping is this; Snipe your max amount at the last possible second. This way you eliminate competition against your max bid and you stand a chance of getting the object for a slightly lower price if there arent others using your tactic. ( If everyone snipes in at the last second with their max bid then all bets are off. ) If you know the max that you want to pay for the object and youre bidding against bargain hunters this may be the way to go.
All good advice here. Although I’m now perhaps more confused than ever.
One other question: If I click the BID button with 15 seconds to go, but I take 60 seconds to complete the transaction (slow connection, small seizure, whatever), do I still get in under the wire?
Running with Scissors, you are the scum of the Earth.
Actually I`m just a slow typer.:smack:
CurtC, you’re not following. If I put a bid in with a week to go, it’s very likely to get bid against. Why? That’s just the way it works. Pencil Pusher has an excellent reason for it. Putting a $50 bid in against Bidder A (who has a max bid in at $30), gives him an extra week to decide whether or not he’s actually willing to bid $31. Or $32. Or…
If I put a bid in with 10 seconds to go, Bidder A doesn’t have that luxury. I win at $30.50, period.
As for the rules I posted, they were to clarify to Beastal that the proxy bidding done by eBay is automatic, not with a slight delay. They don’t contradict my post in the least.
Nope. It takes the bid once you put your amount and password in.
I’m an ebayholic; I have a real problem.
Anyway, through bidding on thousands of items over about four years, I’m left with the impression that sniping works. If you bid $50 a week before the auction is over, that give your “competitors” a week to think about their bids, and more time to outbid you. If I wait to snipe, the current high bidder is lulled into a false sense of security. In any case, I don’t leave him enough time to decide to up his bid.
My reasons are 2 fold:
- There are those out there who will bid against you 16 different times trying to run your bid up. Not just to make you pay more, but just to see what they’ll get it for. They don’t understand, or maybe believe Proxy Bidding works, so they attempt to increment their bid, one dollar at a time to beat you. They stop when they’re the high bidder, or when they meet their maximum.
SO, I bid with 1 week to go. I bid 50 bucks, that’s as much as I want to spend…after my bid, the current bid is at 25.
Joe Dummy comes in, bids 12 1$ increments, til he gets to $38, his maximum. The auction ends the next day, with no other bidders. I paid 38 for the item.
Now re-do this scenario. Joe Dummy comes in BEFORE I bid, and sees the current high bid of 24 dollars (The bid I trumped to 25 when I placed my 50 bid) He bids 1 dollar, becomes the high bidder at 25 (But with no extra in the proxy), and goes away. THEN I place my 50 dollar bid, which pushes the current bid to 26, and I win the item for 26 versus 38. Bidding in the last few minutes gives me the opportunity to come AFTER all the Joe Dummys that will end up pushing my bid higher, when they’re just gonna stop as soon as they see they are the high bidder.
This also increases my odds of beating Joe Dummy, because he will bid until he sees he’s the high-bidder…I like to give him the pleasure of being the high-bidder BEFORE I get to the scene, and at the last minute, where he can’t counter me, assuming his max is higher than mine.
- It gives me the opportunity to research my purchase as long as I need to. If I don’t like bid price for this or that auction in the final minutes I move on. Or if I place a last minute bid an lose, no worry, I’ll just go to the next auction. However, if I place my bid 1 week out, then I am “tied” to that item until I find out if I won or lost. Which means a better deal might come around (A cheaper Buy It Now auction, for example) but too bad, I’m married to this one.
This is why I bid at the last minute. If that’s not how you want ebay to work for you,that’s cool. But it is how I want it to work…You want it to work a different way, and great thing about eBay…it works in different ways for different people with different dispositions.
Steve
I agree with Sniping. It does work, and I use if frequently.
Running with Scissors has a got a good point, so I will reverse my position a little bit: I concede sniping might be effective if the pool of potential bidders for the particular item is mostly composed of irrational bidders (i.e. Beannibe Babies and other unique collectibles) who are not likely to have used max bids.
However, if the item you’re bidding on mainly attracts rational bidders (i.e. Cisco routers or other commodities), then setting a max is the way to go, as the other bidders are likely to have already done the same.
Skeptico, what sort of items do you bid on where you regularly encounter rational bidders? And please, explain to me why it’s better to place a max bid of $50 with a week left than to place a max bid of $50 with 1 minute left.
Here is a concrete example http://cgi6.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewBids&item=3048408224.
Note that brenthenry placed his $250 bid first, 3 days before the end of the auction.
Then mabarnes jumped in with a bid for $80.
12 hours before the end, Jonathon8000 stepped in with bids of $82, $200, $300, and $326.
A few hours later, brenthenry came back with $301, $321, then finally $331 (it might have even been higher - eBay doesn’t show how high the highest bid was - just the amount it took to win).
Had brenthenry placed his original $250 bid with 10 seconds to go, in all likelyhood brenthenry would have snagged the item for $84, because Jonathon8000 probably would have stopped at $82 (since it would have been the high bid at the time it was placed). In this case, sniping could have saved brenthenry $247.
You can snipe manually - it doesn’y need to be one second from the end, all you need to do is prevent folks like Jonathon8000 from running up their bid chasing your proxy. 10 seconds is just fine. If you win, you win, if you lose, it was too much.
I wrote my own sniping program a few years ago. It is friendly for those who prefer unix-style command line utilities, and it will do things like bid on a set of items - i.e. here are 10 auctions selling printer cartridges, I need 5 of them and I only want to pay $35 each. This program is at http://esniper.sf.net/.
I regularly bid on RCA satellite equipment. I have not seen more than a handful of last second sniping episodes in this little niche.
I will not speculate why, but RCA satellite equipment has more or less a constant final bid price X. (Ok I will speculate: it has to do with street resale price). When a new auction begins, usually the player who puts the max bid at X gets it. You don’t want to pay X+$1 because that just cuts into your profit margin. What the players do is keep checking for the new auctions, and try to be the first to put in a bid for X dollars. In this scenario, sniping is not effective – but this is due to the composition of the bidder’s pool.
It seems to me that the situation is comparable to a game-theory analysis of paper-rock-scissors. In PRS, a strategy of “randomly choose one of the three, with equal probability of each” is unbeatable (on average, no strategy will beat it), but it also can’t win. But if your opponent is using any strategy other than uniform random selection, then there is a strategy you can use which will beat him. So if everybody always used uniform random selection, there would be no reason for you not to do the same. But if there exists anyone who doesn’t use uniform random selection, then you have an incentive to also not use it.
Similarly, in eBay, if everyone entered their true maximum bid once and left it there, then that would be a perfectly good strategy. But given that there exist people who, for whatever reason, don’t do that, it’s good strategy to snipe.
Unfortunately, game theory doesn’t really seem to cover situations like this very well, at least in the writings I’ve seen about it. I suppose that it’s much more difficult to model irrational behaviour than rational.
Here’s another reason not to bid early: in categories where there are many, many listings of basically similar items, some eBayers are too busy or too lazy or too something to look at them all. What they do is look at the items that DO have bids, figuring that some other eBayer has already diligently picked out the ‘best’ of the offerings.
Which is why you’ll find situations where there are 10 ‘Marvy Corner Cutters – brand new in box’ listed, and one of them will have been bid up to $8.00 while three others have not yet drawn the $2.00 opening bid.
It happens in RL shopping, too. Go to any rummage sale and find some item no one is showing any interest in. Pick it up, and give it a thorough inspection. Set it down, and pretend to check in your purse or pocket, like for a list or a wallet – before your fingers leave your pocket someone will have swooped down and grabbed the item to look at it.
They may not even know what it is, let alone whether they want it, but the fact that SOMEONE wants it must mean it’s of greater value than the other items around.
I’ll go along with the majority. After spending FAR too much on ebay, Sniping is the only way to go. Let the noodniks wait all week thinking they are getting that Bentley for $2.00. You swoop in at the last second and bid, oh, $15 and get it for $2.05.
Had you bid $15 a week ago, Mr. $2 would have had a chance to reconsider.
Now: there’s an even better reason to snipe as well…
I’m well known for finding, and buying old, rare books on marketing. If I DON’T snipe, IE: put bids in early, then people can search my ID to see what I’m bidding on.
I’m breeding competition.
Snipe Snipe, and Snipe some more. Unless you’re bidding on my auctions.
Oh: And I can’t believe no one has mentioned NUCLEAR SNIPING.
That’s when two snipers decide to bid so high (Say, $10,000 for a pokemon doll) each thinking, well, it’ll never go that high, and I want it, no matter what.
-Phil
I’ve never seen an actual example of this.
Because of the sniping program I wrote, I have received email from many people who snipe, the vast majority of whom seem to completely understand that sniping is a logical reaction to eBay’s rules. Bidding $10,000 on something worth $2 isn’t logical.