I think I dangled a participle or something. Yes, free software is often used over paid alternatives because it is free. My meaning was that there are reasons to snipe that had not yet been mentioned: The ability to cancel bids without penalty, and the ability to hide interest in an auction.
Sniping to win because other people don’t bid their maximum is the most often cited reason, but I think the two I list are probably more important.
Thanks for clarifying. Yeah, those reasons to snipe are pretty good, if you think about it.
A few hours ago, I was looking at comic books by a particular author on eBay and saw a four book set on auction for a few more hours and a starting bid of $1.25. One person was already in at the starting bid and I put in a bid for $10. Shortly after, I realized I already owned these books (bound into a single volume) but thought “Well, maybe I’ll be outbid”.
Naturally, I was NOT outbid and now own these books 
The saving grace is that the ending bid was a paltry $3.25 so, even with shipping, I’m under $10 for my mistake. Still, where were you snipers when I needed you!?
So the interesting thing is that I used to hang out on eBay all the time, and I don’t think I’ve even logged on in… quite a few years. I am mostly over the auction format in general myself.
But I’ve seen auctions happen… for the kinds of things I watch, a lot of them just don’t happen on eBay anymore. I’ve seen people do them, for instance, manually on reddit or on their own shop site (linking to them from Instagram or somewhere like that), and with house rules like “if something is sniped in the last minute, the auction time extends by 15 min” to get past auto-snipers.
I didn’t know that it originated in the UK. It’s been used in the US for a very long time. I can remember hearing it in American movies from the 1930s.
On a brief search, it seems to have been common US and UK ideom for 100 years or so. I haven’t found any obvious souce…?
Yeah, the 1930s are close to 100 years now!
Seems like only yesterday…?
The problem with eBay is that you can’t sabotage an auction the way Roger Thornhill did in North by Northwest.
“How do we know it’s not a fake? It looks like a fake.”
As a buyer, I occasionally buy from auctions but mostly because you can sometimes get great prices when an auction doesn’t get any attention. Ebay naturally promotes auctions that have more interest, so I rarely draw attention to an auction by bidding until the last few minutes. I’ve been sniped many times by people who are bidding electronically but I generally don’t care enough about the thing I’m buying to be that concerned. Another downside of my strategy (though good for my pocketbook) is that I frequently forget to bid at all and I just miss out on the item.
I sell stuff on eBay too. I used auctions of low-value goods to build up some “items sold” stats and sales feedback when I first started out. I’ve sold hundreds of things on eBay but in recent years, I’ve only used auctions to clear out stuff that’s been sitting around too long and that I would otherwise throw away. I set a minimum bid of $5 and several of these junk lots have sold at that price. Sometimes, bidders bid the lot up to something approaching or exceeding fair value.
Ebay’s minimum bid increment is at least 1% for all auction prices less than $5,000. I’d happily wait an extra 15 minutes for my auction to end if my price went up by the minimum bid increment. And if my price kept compounding by 1% every 15 minutes, I’d be willing to wait quite a while for that auction to play out.
I don’t look at eBay often. But if I had never looked, I would not now own a shoe button hook with the name of a Stockton CA store on it.
I still buy and sell on ebay, and sell using auctions with a Buy it Now option. Most of the bids come in at the last instant, but it’s been that way for twenty years. Nothing has really changed.
I don’t do Ebay, but regularly use more local online auction sites with similar features.
Sniping is business as usual, but doesn’t really make a lot of difference, as the serious buyers all have automated bidding, and the bidding time is extended with each additional bid.
This. I still see scenarios where the auction mode itself made the seller more money: a gadget was listed at Buy It Now for 250, no takers for months on end. Then the seller switched to an auction, and in the bidding frenzy that followed, got 280 at the time he chose to end the auction, ie. soon.
Most of the time the things I buy from online auctions are things I will likely not see available again for several years if I choose to not participate. With these, it’s definitely a gray area, of “how much do I really want this, right now?”, determined at the last minute of the auction. It’s also part of the enjoyment.
I participate in a few auctions where the auction is extended by a day if a leading bid has been placed in the final day. They are auctions of a few hundred items and the bidding is done via email, and the potential audience spans many time zones. This feels fair, as everyone can decide whether to bid more during a time convenient to them. Yes, it takes many days for a few of the items to sell. Those ones sell for tons of money, and I’m sure the seller is very happy. I’m pretty sure the auctioneer is happy with his cut, too.
In graduate school way way back in 2003, we had a course in Internet economics, which in retrospect, was one of the more fascinating and pertinent courses outside of the core courses (accounting, strategy, marketing, etc…)
One of the things we covered were online auctions, and that was the general contention- if the auction has a fixed end time, sniping is a good strategy. If not, then it doesn’t make any sense. And if you want the “right” price (i.e. what the item is worth on the open market), you want to prevent sniping, and the way to do that is to extend the time, until everyone who wants to bid has had a chance. (or have a different kind of auction, of course).
I’ve been fooling around and buying photographic stuff on eBay, and it’s definitely weird. More than once, I’ve tried to find whatever it is I wanted on eBay, but the “Buy it Now” and auctions were going for more than I could find the same item on MPB. Which is kind of weird, and shows that a lot of eBay sellers are making assumptions that eBay is always going to be cheapest for used stuff, which isn’t always the case.
The Internet market is just plain weird. Every year, I buy a new Star Trek calendar. I have them all, going back to the late 1970’s. I always wait until after the new year to get one. I used to buy them on eBay, because they were the cheapest, but when I looked yesterday, the ones on eBay were going for $23 (some combination of $8 for the calendar and $15 shipping, or vice-versa), while the same calendar was $15 with free shipping on Amazon. i guess there are enough low-information buyers to make it worthwhile.
That auction i mentioned that continued until a day after the last bid? Most of the stuff sold was mechanical puzzles that are not available except when a collector sells his stuff. And a lot of it sells for very high prices.
But the collections being sold include a wide variety of stuff. And one of those auctions included a puzzle that was still in production, new. It was a nice puzzle, but at that time, you could buy it new from the maker for €15 plus shipping, and it sold for a few hundred dollars.
I sometimes participate in a “blind auction” of used jigsaw puzzles. There, the minimum bid is about what the puzzle is “worth”, and all bids are emailed in and revealed at the same time. Highest bid wins. No one can buy more than 3 puzzles at the minimum. I think the tie breaker is which bid came in first, but i don’t think there are a lot of ties, I’ve never run into one.
You may be joking, but I wish it were possible! Every so often I see an auction or BIN that is so egregiously bad, so blatant, that I wish I could yell to everyone looking at it, “This is a rip off!”