Exactly. It’s a clash of cultures and expectations. In the US and mostly the UK, people expect to lnow what the ‘price’ of an item is; it’s shown on the label.
I actually found it rather fun when visting Morocco to play the game of bargaining with the vendors in the souks: once they realized I grasped it, we both knew the rules. Though they probably took me to the cleaners in the end, to use a UK ideom.
20 years ago or so, when I used to buy stuff on Ebay pretty often, I used sniping software I ran locally on my computer, and for reasons I haven’t really seen mentioned yet.
The sniping software works exactly the same, but I’m not putting in my max bid until the very end of the auction. This has one really huge advantage: I can cancel my snipe at anytime with no penalty, unlike a real bid, where I’m committed once it’s placed.
This strategy worked very well for items where lots were listed at once. The item normally sells for $50, but sometimes sells for $40. I program the sniping software to bid $42 on all of the auctions. First time I win, I cancel the rest of my snipes before they bid. In exchange for waiting longer to buy, I’m guaranteed of getting one of the outlier low prices.
This is the other place where sniping can work very well. If an item is being ignored and has very few bids, I withhold exposing my interest until the last few seconds of the auction. If the item is no-reserve, and I put in a $25 max bid, maybe I create interest. If I put in a $25 snipe, maybe I win for $4.
This is all back when Ebay was fun to use. Now I just think of it as yet another markeplace, not any different than Amazon, Temu, or Aliexpress.
I’ve been to Morocco too. My (at the time) girlfriend really enjoyed bargaining and we got some amazing deals on leather bags and belts in Fez.
The sellers kept wanting to talk to me, because they could see I was the soft touch, but she kept pushing the price lower and lower 
To me, I look mostly for items where i can make an offer, so generally 10-20% under the listed price. I also bid on things, but then dont check back until i win.
Always useful to have a ‘good cop / bad cop’ partnership going, I guess!
Right. All that early bidding does is potentially raise the price if anyone else wants it.
One trouble with “buy it now”, is today people think their shit don’t stink. Ebay used to be the actual “price guide”: with bidding, things sold for de facto what they were worth, what the market would bear.
Now people put ridiculous BIN process that can be 10X what the thing is worth. And I suspect they don’t sell. So someone is paying listing fees for nothing. I don’t get it.
Listing fees aren’t charged unless the item sells, unless the seller has more than 250 auctions per month or opts for paid upgrades.
Auctions are mostly dead, but some people don’t realize it and that works out to my benefit.
I’ve been buying tons of old books this year. I didn’t use to go to eBay because you couldn’t trust amateurs to describe books properly. Now that many professionals put their stock up that’s gotten better. For more important is that eBay shows pictures, which means I can check if the book is truly the first printing of the first edition, a fine point even most professionals fail to list.
The overwhelming majority of book listings are not auctions. I love the few that are. I can’t remember the last time I put in a bid at an auction and got outbid by someone. I always get the book for the minimum price. At some point in the future, everybody will learn the folly of auctions for a used book but I think I’ll have stopped looking by then.
It’s difficult for me to imagine an automated auction system that didn’t allow last-second bidding, and therefore how you would prevent someone winning an auction that way. In-person auctions may have functioned differently, before the internet, where it was at the auctioneer’s discretion when to end the bidding. I don’t know if even in-person auctions function that way now.
I’m in a couple of Facebook groups that often have auctions. They are handled manually by the group owner and their rules are that if a bid comes in within x time of the scheduled end of the auction the auction is extended by y time.
That’s the way a lot of auctions on HiBid.com work - late bids extend the auction by a minute or two.
I have heard so they can use those (fake) auctions to show how valuable their item is. Take that with a grain of salt.
Yeah. Close bidding after 5pm on Tue, or 30 minutes after the last bid received, whichever is later.
Totally neuters sniping, and especially auto-sniping.
Couple that with Vickrey auction bidding (winner pays minimum increment over 2nd place bid) & you get a program where both sides have a decent shot at honest price discovery. What a country!
I’ve skulked around eBay for years, but never bought or sold anything. Last month I finally jumped on two items I happened to be very interested in. The first one had a buy-it-now price that was very reasonable even compared to recently completed auctions, so I bought it and it worked out.
The second item showed up as a standard auction with no buy-it-now option and no published reserve price, but a reasonable starting bid (so I guess that was effectively the reserve). I was a little annoyed but decided to keep an eye on it. I just bookmarked the listing page, but I saw that half a dozen other people had put it on their eBay watch list. Never having bid on an item before I did a little research on the process, sniping, strategies, etc., and I settled on Darren_Garrison’s strategy of just placing my maximum bid. However, per Roderick_Femm’s comment, I did wait until a couple hours before the auction was to end before placing my bid. I knew I was going to be out for dinner that evening so I wouldn’t be able to check up on it at the last minute. I wouldn’t consider a few hours sniping, but it was a short enough timeframe that anyone who wasn’t THAT interested in the item probably wouldn’t swoop in at the last second. I also upped my maximum by a few dollars to avoid losing out by pennies (instead of $150.00 I put the max bid at $155.50 or something like that). In the end the next highest bid was $120 so I got it for $120.50. That bid came in 2-3 hours before closing so it was probably just one other person with the same strategy who just wasn’t as interested.
Now, if I’d waited until the last second, assuming there were no other bids, could I have gotten it at something closer to the $70 starting bid? Maybe, but that’s time/effort/stress that I don’t want to bother with, and there’s a value attached to that. I also don’t get off on scoring the best deal, or the gamification thereof, which is what sniping seems to be. I bid high enough that if someone else got it, then I wouldn’t be upset at losing, but the bid was also low enough that I wouldn’t also be upset at winning. It that seems to work just fine.
All they’d have to do is extend the auction time by fifteen minutes (or whatever arbitrary time) after the last bid to allow others to counter bid. That’s the trick here that allows sniping to be effective- the hard and fast auction length.
In person auctions always sort of restarted once the auctioneer said “going once, going twice”, and someone submitted a last-second bid. Everyone else got some amount of time to beat that bid if they so chose.
eBay on the other hand, ends the auction at the time the seller specifies, regardless of how close to the wire the last bid comes in. Of course, maximum bids higher than that will win, but if nobody’s got one of those set, then sniping is effective.
I’m sorry, I don’t think that would work, no seller would want to have an auction with no fixed end date and time. But that’s just my opinion.
That’s exactly how in-person auctions work though; the auctioneer only stops the auction when everyone is finished bidding, and not a moment before. And that’s why you can’t really snipe an in-person auction either.
I sell stuff on eBay - I would friggin love it if I got enough bids to effectively stretch out the end period for several days! What seller doesn’t want more bids?!
Ahem.
Unless you have some other reason in mind than “Why should I pay anyone else to do something I can do for free myself?”