I should think so! Shilling is illegal.
I am taken aback by how many posters urge the “bid your max” strategy. This is exactly what the seller wants you to do. I don’t see how it helps a buyer at all. Knowing you max is really, really good, but it isn’t a cut and dried figure. It’s a rough guestimate of a ballpark approximation to some vague value. Plus there are a lot of other factors that come into play given the nature of eBay auctions.
Example, my recent buy: Three instances of the same item were posted (by the same seller), ending on a succesive days. Maybe I’m willing to pay up to 80 for it. (Made up #s.) So I’d try for $40 on the first one (under the price I’ve seen it go for recently), if I don’t get it, $60 on the second (a fair price) and $80 on the third ('cause I actually need this item, seriously). So why proxy bid $80 on the first or second? If someone else is willing to jack it up to over $60, let them have them. I doubt that there will be such competition for the third. (Sometimes is goes the other way, people ignore the first few and then all pile on the last one.)
So the first had early decent bids, I didn’t bid. I sniped and got the second for a nearly bargain basement price. If I had “bid my max” on the first, I (or whoever won) would have paid quite a bit more.
Again, paying more looks good from a seller’s perspective, but not from a buyer’s. So seller’s don’t like sniping.
And a lot of sellers are using text, threatening to “pull auctions” before they are over if no early bids come in. To encourage early bidders.
I’ve also seen somewhat more ethical sellers offer to pay shipping if you “Buy it now”.
It’s a dance, a dance between buyers and sellers that has been going on for years.
-P
I am willing to concede that when snipers win auctions, they sometimes get it for less than if they had bid early; however, there is a much higher risk of not winning at all. When you are desperate to win an auction (which is what the OP was talking about), getting the absolute lowest price is less important than being the winning bidder.
Fear: Personally, I don’t use sniping software, I use
http://www.hammertap.com/?secret1
I load it with the item # and my high bid and I can walk away. It’s never missed a snipe yet, and I think I’ve done over 200 snipes with them so far.
The nice thing too is it checks every six hours. If i’m “Outbid” (And remember, I haven’t really bid yet), it emails me.
Deep analysis, available from the same link is actually a better deal than Andale’s research, and you only have to pay once.
At any kind of auction, you have to know what you are willing to pay before you start bidding, and stick to it. If you don’t, you risk getting caught up in the action and paying way too much.
Unless you are Bill Gates, there is always the possibility that somebody with more motivation and money than you will be bidding on an item you covet. There can only be one winner, and it won’t always be you.
The best strategy to win an auction on eBay is to figure out your maximum, then snipe at that amount. You won’t pay more than you want, and you may pay a lot less.
If you just start bidding without thinking about how much an item is worth to you, and somebody else does the same thing, you’ll get into a bidding war - you may win, but you’ll probably pay way more than you ever intended to.
Your question in the first sentence is answered in the last sentence. You just don’t know. Maybe the first one will be cheap and the last one will be expensive? Or maybe the other way around? Just snipe each one with your max, and give up when you’ve won.
It might be really cheap, or it might not be, but it won’t be more than the value that you place on the item. If you don’t win any, then perhaps you should reconsider the value it has for you, as evidently the winning bidders value the item more than you do. C’est la vie.
No, not emotionally involved at all. If there is a sniper out there targeting your item and you want to win the item, even if it’s not that important for you, you have to snipe too, or lose. Learning about potential snipers gives you the edge. If you know the sniper is using a program that snipes 30 seconds before end of auction and he always bids in 10 +.03 increments, you can kick his butt by bidding 10 + .04 increments at 35 seconds before end of auction.
**
**
But what if 30 seconds before the auction closes someone outbids you by a dollar? Wouldn’t you be willing to go an extra $2 to win a mountain bike? No, you don’t want to get into a bidding war, but as long as you realize that the next bid (after this extra $2 bid) isn’t $2 more but $4 more than your “Max” you should be able to keep yourself under control. And the point about sniping is it keeps the bidding wars to a minimum. There are just so many bids you can place in 30 seconds.
**
**No. This was a different alarm clock. The one I want I wouldn’t stop at $100. Maybe $105.23. I don’t know. Maybe I’d even go higher. I really want this thing. It’s not just ANY alarm clock. And in the auction I lost I changed my mind about my max a day or so after I bid. I could have bid again, but I would have raised the price to a dollar above my own personal proxy max. Which would have been stupid. In one fell swoop, by bidding against myself, I would have raised the bid from $15 to $41. The only way to protect my $40 bid was to be ready to snipe, which I wasn’t because of that blasted friends episode. Let this be a lesson to you sellers out there. This one picked the wrong time to end his auction. If he would have waited two hours he would have at least made an extra $5.
**
Well in this case it’s not so simple. I am not looking for AN alarm clock. I’m looking for a -specific model… 7-4966B If anyone wants to make an extra $100 I have a couple of searches going on and being emailed to me on a daily basis. The second this item comes up for sale I’m not even gonna let it get too far into bidding. I’m emailing the seller and making him an offer to close early. That’s how much I want this thing. Yeah, I’m emotionally involved in THIS one, but believe me, if the seller refuses to close the auction early, I’ll take off work that day, I’ll tape the show I’m watching, even if it’s the finale to Survivor. I’m going to make sure I get this clock whenever it comes up. This auction won’t take me by suprise like the other one did. This is an unusual case. Not a good example for sniping really. But I will not let a sniper take this radio away from me.
And to all of those who think that snipers are bad for sellers, read this ebay discussion.2 hrs to go on 15,000.00 plate Unfortunately the auction is old so you can’t see the bid history but the tale is pretty clear. Someone had a rare plate and put it up for $5, then the snipers started getting in on the action and brought it up to over $16,000. And this WASN’T a nuclear snipe.
If you look at the ebay discussions you’ll find that the only sellers that don’t like snipers are newbies.
If you want to learn all there is to learn about sniping or winning auctions, don’t go to straightdope. Invaluable as this forum is for general info, you should go to the source, where people earn their living selling and buying via Ebay. Go to the Ebay discussion board.
Here is some more info.
Ebay on Sniping
An ebay sniper’s take on sniping
Here is another web page that lists other advantages of sniping
Oh, I found one more great page on sniping.
http://www.moyen.org/snipe
I’d like to quote this one thing from this page:
But the point is that you Don’t know if there is a sniper targetting the item. Perhaps a sniper for a previous auction haslost interest in the item, or found it elsewhere. There could also be new snipers joining in. Doing “research” is futile, and a waste of time.
No, because I sniped my maximum. If I lose, it wasn’t meant to be. If you say “gee, I’ll pay $1 more, or $2, or …”, then you don’t have a maximum.
**
“I don’t know” means you don’t know your maximum. How much is this alarm clock really worth to you? $100? $110? $200? $1000? If you really think about it, you do have a maximum. If Bill Gates really wants it and will pay $10,000 for it, and you really want it and will pay $110 for it, then Bill will win, at $112.50 (or whatever - 1 increment above your highest bid).
When you see you lost an auction by $1, you don’t know how much the winner bid - all you see is one increment above your highest bid. So if Bill Gates won at $112.50, that doesn’t necessarily mean that if you bid $115 that you would have got it.
Wrong! If you are the high bidder, and you place another bid, that doesn’t raise the price. There are two exceptions to this rule:
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if it is a reserve price auction, your old bid was below reserve, and your new bid is above reserve. The “current high bid” will now be the reserve price.
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if the 2nd highest bid is less than a full increment below your high bid, your rebid will move the price up to a full increment above the 2nd highest bid. For example, if you bid $101, then somebody else bid $100, the winning bid is $101. If you raise your bid, the winning bid will be $102.50, because the increment at $100 is $2.50, so your new winning bid is now exactly one increment above the 2nd highest bidder.
OK, you probably meant to put a smiley here, but…
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You can bid your max whenever you want. It doesn’t have to be in the last 10 minutes. And you can setup your sniper anytime you want, too.
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eBay is a global marketplace. Just because an auction ends at an inconvenient time for you, doesn’t mean it is inconvenient for somebody in your area that doesn’t watch Friends, or somebody on the other side of the country, or somebody halfway around the world. In my selling experience, end time doesn’t seem to help much, but advertising that I’ll ship anywhere in the world does. I’ve sold items to people in England, Poland, Germany, Italy, Korea, Malaysia, etc.
How about http://www.colyp.com/gopauls/electronics.htm? It doesn’t say if it is black or not (that’s what the “B” means, right?). If it is, can I have my $100 finders fee?
Or just fire up your sniper with a bid for $100 (or whatever you determine your true max is) and get on with your life.
False. Suppose you set your maximum for an item at $80, and snipe that amount a few seconds or a minute before the end of the auction. If, on the first day of the auction, I had set my maximum at $100, then I’ll still win. And I’ll pay exactly as much as I would have had you put in your $80 bid on the first day, too. Sniping does not protect you against other snipers; it defends you against the “Joe dirt” bidders who will ignore the proxy bidding and drive up the price. In fact, sniping can make you more vulnerable to snipers, since as you point out, in the event of a tie or near-tie, the earlier bid will win.
Anyone who doesn’t think sniping works doesn’t remotely understand the psychology of auctions. It works in theory and it works in practice. Is there anyone here who still doesn’t believe this, because if not I’ll give a shot at explaining it.
Just one note to people still involved in this thread:
Sniping commodities (IE: Common Beanie Babies, or something you can get ANYWHERE) is really a waste of time. Bid your max and be done with it.
It’s the one-of-a-kind-rare deals that sniping shows it’s true power. How do you put a fair value on a rare asset? Something that trancends the commodity price equation? You don’t. Those prices are purely set by supply and demand and selling psychology.
A variation of sniping exists even in the real world. When submitting tenders EVERYONE always waits until the last day-hour-minute to submit the offers.
Always? You mean you have never lost an auction that you sniped? If so, I would say you just haven’t bid on enough auctions to know if sniping works or not. Sooner or later, you will run up against another sniper with a higher bid, or a previous bidder with a higher proxy, and then you lose by a dollar. I would say that snipers lose more auctions than they win. The OP specifically said he was desperate to win this auction; sniping is a poor way to increase your odds of winning. As I said before, I will concede that in the auctions that you win, you may get a lower price, but that is not what this thread is about.
I thought the thread had devolved into a general debate about whether sniping was at all worthwhile. Sniping isn’t about winning auctions (though you will win more auctions by sniping) - that depends on your max bid. Sniping is about getting the best price given any given max bid. If he is that desperate to win this auction then he should just bid 2 times what he thinks the max bid might be. If you have a good server then there isn’t a single instance where sniping isn’t better than bidding. It may not always get you a better deal, but it will never get you a worse one.
Given the same maximum bid whether you snipe or not then this isn’t true.
Quote Chronos
If, on the first day of the auction, I had set my maximum at $100, then I’ll still win. And I’ll pay exactly as much as I would have had you put in your $80 bid on the first day, too. Sniping does not protect you against other snipers; it defends you against the “Joe dirt” bidders who will ignore the proxy bidding and drive up the price. In fact, sniping can make you more vulnerable to snipers, since as you point out, in the event of a tie or near-tie, the earlier bid will win.
It might sound good in theory but not so.
Case in point
My current situation.
With a week to go with the auction I bid on a virus scan cd.
I paid the buy it now price.
Three days later ebay contacts me saying the auction is null and void.
Reason account suspention.
Reason for account suspention-?? several possibilities. Including fraud,inappropriate product
copyright infringement & several others so I don’t know for sure.
Anyway if I had waited until the end of the auction to bid either the product wouldn’t be available
or I would have at least recieved something for my money.
Now it looks like I have no recourse.I paid using paypal. The seller has already accepted my money.
I realize as you should that this is a isolated incident but so is are the reasons for not trying to get the
best deal by sniping an auction.
Whats really happening is the sniper is trying to get his deal while the others aren’t paying attention.
Damn gerbils!! Ate my post.
Sure it’s futile IF there are no snipers or if there are new snipers you can’t research. But if I look for an item and I notice a guy who keeps winning auctions (even if he doesn’t snipe) for the same item. He is obviously a collector or a seller. I can be fairly sure he is targeting my item. Even if he isn’t, I can’t second guess myself. I know the potential is there and it would be stupid of me not to take the contingency that he snipes into consideration. The only way for me to get the edge over him is to use what advantage I have, time to learn as much about him as I can.
And as I said earlier, it might not be worth the time it takes to do the research. It’s up to you as to how much you really want the item.
Truth be told, our “maximum” is really a grey area. You are going to have a hard time convincing me that you know your maximum price to the penny for the rare 1989 21" Bridgestone MB-Zip mountain bike. This bike can go for $700. You might not be willing to pay $725, but would you go $710.53? If you would go $710.53, wouldn’t you pay $711? I mean, what’s freaking 47 cents against $710? It’s not much at all but it could win you the bike. The higher the value (and the more rare), the greater the grey area. Snipers know that there is a grey area and they take advantage of it.
That’s the reason to research the snipers (and other bidders). If they are commonly targeting the same item, then you can probably get fairly good estimate about their max.
Yeah, you’re right. That was my mistake. But bidding your max too early can be a mistake, because I honestly believe that the max is a grey area and the snipers will exploit the grey area.
Naturally, but in general U.S. buyers like to buy from U.S. sellers. UK buyers like to buy from UK sellers. Sellers know this. It’s pretty much common knowledge that you should close your items when the buyers are at home, and at the computer. It would be incredibly stupid to sell your football merchandise DURING the superbowl. But one hour AFTER the superbowl… that’s probably the best time of the year to sell football merchandise. So, if you’re really smart, and your auction’s gonna close during the premiere of a popular show like Friends, you’ll set your auction to close during a commercial break. 
Okay, maybe after Friends, during Will and Grace. Okay, after Will and Grace.
Well dang. That wasn’t hard to find now was it? Just put 7-4966 in Google. First hit. I’ll check it out and I suppose I could give you some reward. Not $100. Still have to buy the thing. Woah! Did you realize that they are in the West Indies? Honestly it doesn’t look good. They have another website and it’s down. But I’ll check it out.
Yeah, I will. But believe me, I’ll be ready just in case.
No, sniping DOES protect you against other snipers. It’s because of one reason: Reactonary Bids. If you’ve done your research then you have a better chance of knowing how much a good bid is. If you bid 3 minutes before close a sniper will know you are there and bid accordingly. He’s not stupid. If you raise the high bid a dollar more than his supposed “max” then he’s possibly going to raise his max bid a bit. Even though he knows your proxy might still be higher than his new max bid, the worse thing that can happen to him is he loses the item and makes you pay more. But since he knows you are probably not nibbling this late in the game he knows that a dollar more than the current high bid’s not gonna do it. So he’ll probably raise his max bid even more, if he wants the item enough. Again, grey area here. But if you bid 5 seconds before you are fairly sure he’s going to bid, and you bid with an educated guess about his maximum bid in mind, he won’t have a chance. If you bid the same amount he does, and he bids even 1 second later, you win.
**Oh! And for the OP!!
There are (at least) 3 sniping services on the net.
http://www.esnipe.com
http://www.vrane.com
http://www.auctiontamer.com
(eBay Auction Sniper - BidTamer)
With these, you can shut down your computer. They do all the work. They are also very reasonably priced, supposedly.
**
Oh and one more thing. How do you know how much your max bid SHOULD BE? Research. Please don’t tell me that when you bid on a graphics card you just arbitrarily decide that this particular graphics card is worth, “oh, I suppose $357.93.” You have to know how much you can expect to pay by driving over to Best Buy, or by buying it online, and how much the thing is going for on Ebay. You need to know the minimum amount people are paying and the maximum amount people are paying. You don’t want to pay too much. Compare all of those values, then think about where along this minimum and maximum market value you want to fall.
It boils down to recognizing your limits. In this example, you are already close - you know you won’t pay $725, but you will pay $700, and perhaps a bit more. You are down to 2500 choices (to the penny) - pick one and go with it. If you win, you win, if not, next time.
(and the MB-0 is a nice bike)
I don’t advocate that. I advocate sniping your max with about 10 seconds to go. If you have sniping software, you can set it up a week in advance, if you like.
We’re dealing in generalities here. I’ll agree with the first part (US seem to be a bit xenophobic), but completely disagree with the second. I’m in the US, but since I advertise that I’ll ship worldwide, about half of my buyers have been from outside the US. There are a great many items that are available and relatively inexpensive in the US, but either unavailable or very expensive outside the US.
One trivial example: Canon G3 digital camera. Street price in US: $450. Street price in Canada: $900 (which is about $660 USD). I don’t know what the import duty is, but I really doubt it is 50%.
<sarcasm>
Oh no, they’re in Trinidad! You might be dealing with a serial murderer! They’ll track you down and swing a shrunken head in your face!
</sarcasm>
A little more seriously, I think they use UK-style plugs and 220 Volts AC in Trinidad, so you’ll need to spend about $10 to get it to work. If it uses an external transformer (i.e. “wall wart”), you can buy a replacement transformer http://www.action-electronics.com/acadaptr.htm. If not, one of these http://www.action-electronics.com/trnsupdn.htm> will do the trick (scroll 2/3 of the way to the bottom and buy the bronze/black wart on the right - note that the picture is incorrect, and the description is confusing - you might want to call them).
I don’t regard myself as stupid, but I’m never “there” with 3 minutes before close. When the auction closes I might be working on my house, or at the library with my kids, or whatever. I don’t really know when the auctions I’m bidding on end, because I just set them up in the sniper and forget about it. If the current price goes above my max with 3 minutes remaining, I lose. That’s OK, because the current price is above what I was willing to pay.
Although these do let you shut down your computer, I have a problem with these in that they need to know your eBay username and password.
I’m playing around with this http://www.actiontec.com/products/modems/dual_pcmodem/dpm_overview.html right now. Doesn’t look like much, right? If you look closely, it’s really a little linux box with a 144MHz processor, 8 megs of RAM, 2 ethernet ports and a built-in modem. Also has USB and 2 serial ports, but they aren’t brought out on the case (well - sort of - the reset button is on a serial port). With a little work, you can load whatever software you want on it (subject to memory limitations, of course). My sniper would take no more than about 20k on this box, and probably less than that.