That’s the point, how much would someone be willing to pay if there were other bidders or not for the same auction? I know I’ve been willing to get a bit closer to the in shop price on one occasion, perhaps because I knew I would beat someone else to the punch.
I agree with everything The Blonde Bomber said. I don’t bid on Ebay often, but I will always snipe, and the only time I’ve lost an auction was when another sniper had a bid in that was more than $300 more than mine. I wasn’t that upset.
I think the key to smart bidding is twofold:
- Watching the auction.
- Not letting ANYONE know you’re interested in the item.
99/100, a good sniper will win.
It depends on whether or not $50 was your ABSOLUTE maximum. If someone REALLY wanted the item, of course they’d be willing to pay the extra $2.12. The sniper has in fact put one over on you.
So $17.74 is totally insignificant to you? How could it not be, at very least, less cool than $20? The motivation behind sniping isn’t ‘getting one over’, it’s saving $17.74 by not driving the price up before the auction ends.
There’s the fallacy. An extra $2.12? Then maybe an extra $3.49? Then an extra $4.97, and so forth.
This is what nakes sellers on eBay rich (the few that are!)- the idea of “well, it’s just a little bit more”. Either you’re willing to pay X, or X.99. The whole “just a little bit more” is a fallacy for unwary buyers.
Bid your maximum. If you do that- the only way you can possibly lose is if another buyer is willing to pay more. The lower bid NEVER wins.
Maybe the point is I don’t ever have an absolute maximum. Ebay is a marketplace. I’m always willing to adjust my bid best on what other people think the item is worth. Then again, 75% of my bids are on one-of-a-kind items whose value is entirely subjective.
Even if I didn’t snipe, I would NEVER bid before the last ten seconds of the auction. It alerts people to your presence, and significantly lowers your chances of winning.
A “Random sample” of auctions is a fallacy, if the question is, “Which way is better, early or late bidding on an auction you would like to win”. This is because a percentage of auctions will end w/no bidders at all, either because there was no interest or the start price of the auction was too high. But these have zero bearing on the true effectiveness of early vs late bidding, because they AREN’T AUCTIONS YOU WOULD BID ON.
Perhaps an example - there are 10 auctions on Ebay. On 9 of the auctions, the starting price is $1,000,000 for a crisp, new $100 bill. On the last auction, the starting price is $1. If you look at the 9 high starting price auctions, you might think that “most auctions don’t get bids”, but that wasn’t the question - the question was how to win an auction that YOU ARE GOING TO BID ON.
As far as early vs late bidding, it isn’t any contest at all - Doesn’t matter whether you are going to place another bid or not. There are two forces at work that guarantee that late bidding is a better strategy:
- The “If there aren’t any bids, there must be something wrong with the auction” psychology
- The “I will only bid until I have the highest bid, rather than my maximum” psychology.
If there is any chance at all of either 1) or 2) operating, late bidding is better. Even if 1) and 2) aren’t true, the only way late bidding can be WORSE is in the event of a tie. In the case of a tie, you DON’T lose any Expected Value (EV), you just don’t get the item. On the other hand, if late bidding causes your final price to be lower because bidders utilizing strategy 1) and 2) , then you have gained EV.
And since +EV is always better, late bidding is always better, QED 
Well, yeah, it would be my ABSOLUTE maximum. If I wanted to spend $52.12 on the item I’d bid $52.12.
I don’t understand this, either. I haven’t bid on eBay for a while, but from what I remember, if the minimum price is set by the seller at $15.00 and I proxy bid $50, the price eBay puts up in public view shows $16.00 (or something like that - I forget exactly how it works). Other bidders may push the price up, but no one will know the amount of my proxy bid until someone over-bids me.
Hit the wrong button…
With a proxy bid, the only way I’d actually pay $50 for the item is if some stupid sniper comes in at the last minute and bids $49.73…but I’d still save 27 cents off my maximum bid.
So Johnny LA, what was your bidding strategy on that Arri 35 BL shooting package? (And a Merry Christmas to you!)
Sniped it. Too bad I can’t keep it. 
As for King Kong: 2 hours left, 18 watchers, no bids.
That’s why I only included those with at least one bid. Most had only one bid (now, I didn’t count how many there were of those, I only counted how many had 10+ bids). In other words, my sample was of auctions with more than one bid. Of 37 random slections, 3 had 10+ bids, most of the rest had one bid.
But you forget the other “force”: 3) “Hmm, there’s no bids on this at all, so maybe I can lowball it and steal it.” Here, an early bid will prevent bids of this sort.
If you were to be *the only other bidder * then certainly sniping would protect your price from nibblers and bid wars. But- if there are several other bidders, and one of them “nibbles” the price high, or two others get into a bidding war- then the price is going to get too high for any sort of bid- snipe or no.
And even if you seem to be “the only other bidder”, then the fallacy is that you’re the only sniper on eBay. I have seen snipers get sniped. Again, a type of auction where sniping doesn’t really help.
I am not saying that sniping is worthless. There are rare occasions where it helps (by that I don’t mean just winning, I mean getting the auction at a significant discount).
But snipers don’t really snipe becuase they save $$- they snipe becaase they enjoy doing it- it’s " the beautiful thing". No really, if snipers were smart, they’d never tell other bidders to snipe- since other snipers reduce the already small chance that sniping will help. But snipers have a compulsion to tell others to snipe- to brag about the “auction they won with only 1 second”- to glory in the competition. But there is no competition amoung smart bidders. None at all. You bid exactly what you’re willing to pay, and thus if you get outbid you haven’t lost anything- other than a chance to pay TOO MUCH for that item.
Exactly. 
If I wanted to pay 52.12, I’d bid 52.12. :rolleyes:
Snipers seem to work on the belief that they know what your Proxy is. In fact that’s the crux of several arguments here: "But realisticly, how many snipers would see an early proxy bid of $51 proxy bid from day one and then bid $51.99 at the last second of the auction? Please! In real life, the sniper is aware that the current bid is $51 and bids at least $52. " :dubious:
Hmm pretend I am trying to get a item, and have a tentative max of 50 dollars to spend. There are several different situations that are possible, which determine which strategy, proxy or sniping, is best.
to define my terms:
when I say high bid, I mean the eventual high bid that will win if I don’t outbid it
nibbler: a guy who doesn’t use the proxy bidding system, always enters bids in manually, will try to enter bids to evaluate what the max bid is. Will often overbid.
Bid Warrior: a guy who’ll enter a max bid, but when outbid will raise five bucks or so in hopes of getting it for just a little more.
Hard limit guy: DrDeth’s strategy of bid, let it go.
1)sniping will always be better on auctions with only one nibbler, because the nibbler won’t have time to nibble, regardless of whether the nibbler’s limit is above my limit.
1a)sniping doesn’t have as much advantage over multiple nibblers, but still saves some money, because the nibblers will drive the price up amongst themselves. However if the viewed price is below my max, sniping is still better, as the nibblers might still nibble on any proxy bid.
1b) in an auction with nibblers and someone else, it is dependant on who has the high bid. If the nibbler has the high bid, it is just 1a, the other guy is irrelevant. If the other guy has the high bid, his bid is the only relevant factor.
-
the high bid is a Bid warrior with a bid below 50, and willing to bid war it up 10. In this case, both strategies get the item, but the sniper saves 10 bucks
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a hard limit guy with a bid below 50. Both strategies work equally well, though I’d argue proxying is a lot less work.
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Bid warrior with a similar limit to mine. Sniper gets the product for his max cost, and proxy bidding loses the item.
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sniper or proxy guy with similar limit to mine. Proxy bidding has the rare advantage of the incremental cost, but sniping has the even rarer advantage of the case where one guy proxies 50, and someone else proxies 50.03, so the exact bid of 50.03 is revealed to the sniper.
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anyone with a higher limit than me. I lose regardless of strategy.
So, sniping saves some money from nibblers and bid warriors, and sometimes wins an auction that would be otherwise lost to a bid warrior. Alternatively, proxy bidding is easier, doesn’t need scheduling or external programs, and will occaisionally win an auction due to incremental cost issues. Of course the frequency of 1,2,3,4, and 5 are to be argued. I would argue that 4 is probably the most frequent case, as most things have a somewhat agreed upon value, but I would argue that the value of occaisonally saving some money is greater than losing a few auctions.
If I ebay’d more than once or twice a year, I’d probably snipe.
With all due respect, either you simply don’t listen, or you don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t ruled out both.
I’ll give you the last word, as I’ve had my fill with this tortured logic.
DrDeth said:
Did I say that once!?
Please find ONE instance where I said ‘I know what another bidders proxy bid is.’
Show me.
This is what I actually said:
or…
or…
or…
I re-read not only every one of my posts, but the others who have responded to you. Frankly, either you are ignoring the posts, or you just don’t get it. I don’t think you really understand how it all works.
My only regret is that there isn’t more people on ebay with your mentality.
Those are your words. Post 41. To me, they say that the sniper “sees” a proxy bid and “is aware” “that the current bid is”.
If that isn’t what you meant, well…
Taber- you’re more or less correct. But in my random sample, “bid warriors” or “nibblers” occured in only 8% of the auctions.
EXACTLY!
“In real life, the sniper is aware that the current bid is $51…” (Post 41)
Now does that say that the sniper… (your exact words)
…knows your your high proxy bid is, or does it say the sniper “is aware that the current bid is $51”?
How much clearer can I make that?
Not only did you put words in my mouth that I didn’t say, you skipped over several posts that say the opposite!
Dude, you just don’t get it. You keep spouting that 8% fact, but you haven’t shown us a thing. Not only that, it flies in the face of every single poster’s experience.
I’d bet good money that most active ebayers would agree that most auctions have bidders who post more than one bid in the same auction.
I’d double up that bet that most active ebayers would agree that most auctions have more than a single, solitary bidder, (with the exception of "Buy it Now’) and that many—if not most—have multiple bidders; and that 10 bidders in an auction is EXTREMELY common.
Heh, I have also received an email once that screamed “No fair!” when I sniped an item in the last second. I betcha that person is now an active sniper. Our strategies are very similar. I don’t bother bidding (snipe or otherwise) unless I feel that I can get the item at or below the market price after shipping/handling is included. Sometimes I just keep an item on my watch list to see how the bidding is going before deciding if it’s worth placing a snipe bid. And if it’s something I’m fairly indifferent about winning, I might even place (shudder) a proxy bid days before the auction end!
FWIW, the films were sniped at $61.
Wow. What I don’t quite understand is why you’re getting so worked up about it I also think you’re trating your small sample as facts and other people’s small samples as 'mere anecdote. Bad.
And to cap it all, after complaining about logical fallacies, you invoke a strawman argument about exactly what it is that snipers are claiming.
If you really don’t think sniping is effective, then you should be jumping for joy that your competitors in the ebay marketplace are using less effective tactics than yours; but you’re not. Why not?