The key word is “paying”. I’ve autosniped plenty. But never once have I paid for the privilege.
I don’t eBay much any more, and (as the tenor of this discussion indicates) I haven’t had to participate in an actual auction in literal years, but I assure you… I have sniped aplenty and not had to pay to do it.
There is (or, at least, used to be) a fair bit of free software to run on your own PC to do your sniping for you. Not everyone feels impelled to pay someone else to do something they can do for themselves with the slightest bit of technical prowess.
Yeah, were I big into eBay buying I’d sure find a way for my PC to do autosniping, rather than paying some website to do it. Especially if my volume was significant.
I don’t understand why anyone would use software to snipe, much less pay for it, when eBay does it for you itself. Maybe I’m misunderstanding what sniping means in this context. I tell eBay how much I’m willing to spend, and it automatically and immediately increases my bid when anyone else bids an amount less than my maximum. Of course that usually happens during the last few minutes of the auction. Isn’t that sniping?
My experience has been rather different from what others have said in this thread. I’ve sold two items in the last few months on eBay via auctions, and in both cases sold them for a decent price. One of them sold for about 2.5 times my opening bid, the other just a little above it.
I’m unlikely to get into an auction that looks competitive but might toss a lowball bid on something with no action. Picked up a couple albums for cheap-ish that way when it ended with just my starting bid but most people don’t start an auction low enough for this to come up much.
Now that I say it, I think that’s part of the demise of the system. No one wants their bauble to sell for $1 so, if it’s nominally worth $75, they’ll start the auction at $68 and it’s not worth the hassle for the buyer. The potential savings are offset by having to wait for the auction to end and potentially missing out on both that purchase and other similar purchases in the meanwhile. It’s only really good if it’s something you just casually maybe want and I don’t browse eBay these days looking for casual maybe items to place bids on. It used to be a weird fun place to do that back around the late 90s, early 2000s but now it’s basically just a store marketplace and who goes to the store to bid on things?
No, you aren’t. It is bidding in the last seconds of an auction. Some people seem to think that is more significant than being outbid in the first seconds of an auction. (And seem to assume that the sniper made the smallest possible new bid. Say, you bid $49, the sniper wins at $50, you think oh, darn, if only I had more time I would have bid $51. But that only works if the sniper’s hidden max bid isn’t $55 or $550.)
You are misunderstanding what sniping means. Yes, eBay will take a max bid placed on Day 1 and autobid for you. That’s auto bidding, not sniping. Sniping is putting your max bid in with a few seconds left in the auction.
It works. It prevents your bid being bid up by bidders with little self-control and who adjust their mental max bid based on how they perceive others value the item being sold. Auctions with multiple bids get more attention and more views. Sniping helps to limit that.
The complexity of the situation comes from the fact that few to no people are bidding at a “break even” point in a given auction. By “break even” I mean where the price paid exactly matches the utility of the item to you (pretending for a moment that that’s something we precisely know).
If you’re 100% happy to purchase an item for $15.00 and 100% happy to walk away if the price is $15.01, then that’s great – that auction is very simple for you.
But, for most people most of the time, there’s a big gray area of levels of happiness to buy. Let’s say less than about $10, say, we enthusiastically buy, $10-$15 seems about a fair price, $15+ we start to want to walk away, but there is no significant difference between $15.00 and $15.01.
We bid somewhere in the $10-15 zone, which is vulnerable to being sniped, but every strategy has drawbacks. Always bidding the “break even” price would be a risky strategy, with the greatest potential sting if you find the item selling for significantly less tomorrow.
It’s basically the difference between bidding on a completely unique item that will never go for sale again, and normal transactions in a consumer economy. In the former, the optimal strategy is going to be to bid the break even price, or a cent lower. In the latter, there are lots of strategies, most potentially vulnerable to sniping.
Then fair enough, it probably is fairly easy for you to set a line below which you’re happy to buy and above which you’re happy to miss out.
But you appreciate that in more common situations, of where an item is not completely unique and other auctions might/will happen in the future, that it’s not irrational to bid a “snipe-able” value?
(And seem to assume that the sniper made the smallest possible new bid. Say, you bid $49, the sniper wins at $50, you think oh, darn, if only I had more time I would have bid $51. But that only works if the sniper’s hidden max bid isn’t $55 or $550.)
Of course I don’t know what the sniper’s maximum bid was, but that tangential to the point I was making. Let’s say the sniper’s private maximum was indeed only $50. Is it still irrational for the person who bid $49 to be disappointed? Why / why not?
And are you suggesting that the only rational strategy is to always bid the break even price?
I only tried that a couple of times. There was a particular microphone that I was interested in, so I put in a bid.
Almost immediately a counter-bid appeared a bit higher. This went round a couple of times. Eventually my suspicion was that the counter-bids were coming from a sock puppet to drive up the price. I gave up and bought it from an established retailer.
I doubt if I will ever bother to look at eBay again.
No, that’s just how eBay is set up. You bid, but you also tell eBay what your maximum bid will be. If somebody bids higher than your current bid, eBay automatically raises your bid for you. The other person that you thought was a sock puppet was letting eBay handle their maximum bid.
The price was going up because of the way bidding works. If an item is selling for $10, you can put in a bid and say your max is $20. The price won’t go to $20 immediately. It will go to up by whatever the bid increment is, like $10.50. As people bid higher amounts, eBay will automatically up the bid based on what people have said their max is. So if someone bids $11, eBay will automatically up the bid to $11.50 because you said your max was $20. It will keep doing that on your behalf until the bid is higher than your $20 max.
Maybe some people like the process of bargaining, and it is traditional in some cultures.
But if I need something, I’d rather buy it from a shop where the prices are clearly marked. Reminds me of the old Guitar Center in San Jose CA where nothing had a price marker and the salesdroids had the attitude: “Well, sonny, how much money do you have to spend”….
In Shanghai, where I used to live, there’s the “fake market” where you can go for luxury…ahem…”replicas”. It’s a popular place for visitors to go, but you’d see so many people walking out empty-handed, looking exhausted and frustrated. Because it is one of those places where there is no price on anything, and you can’t even look at an item long enough to decide if you want it, because someone’s immediately there hustling you, trying to make a deal.
I think those stores would make a lot more money by just pricing things up, and leaving customers in peace. But I see exactly this clash of cultures in many parts of the world. People trying to sell to Westerners, but in a way that tends to drive those customers away.
In fairness to those sellers, the haggling is the fun and skillful part of the job for them, which might make it extra hard to accept they’d be better off without it.
Using an auction isn’t haggling. Haggling would be trying to convince the seller to lower their price. Which is a thing you can do on eBay if the seller allows it (“Make an Offer”) but separate from the auction function.
Generally though, most people just decide if they want to pay the listed price, use Buy It Now and use the site like a store.