I’ll work my keyboard like these people!
At some site called pingtest.net I pinged a server in Dallas, TX at 23ms. Any other sites at which I should test?
Just put your highest proxy bid in and sit back.** Unless a sniper is willing to pay more, he can’t win. ** In fact if his bid is the same as yours, your proxy bid wins.
If it’s a must have, bid $1000, why not?
Sniping does help avoid a bidding war and “nibblers” but since neither seems to be the case for the OP, there’s more risk than rewards. For example his server or even eBays server could go down at the last minute.
Let me say this one more time- Unless a sniper is willing to pay more, he can’t win.
I suggest using EZ-Sniper or an equivalent service.
It puts your bid in 6 seconds prior to the deadline, leaving humans little time to respond.
Out of hundreds of snipes I’ve used that service for, none has failed.
Can I piggy back a related question?
What if two bidders both place Maximum bids on an item? Say one does $300 and the other does $320; does the current bid automatically jump to $320?
It would jump to the next bidding increment above $300.
Sniping works because some people base their value judgment on what others are willing to pay. If you bid $1000 early, and there’s someone else out there who also cosiders the item to be a must-have, they may very well nibble at it until he’s upped his bid to $1010. It’s one thing to bid $1000 when the current bid is $50; you have to be very sure about what the value of the item is. It’s quite another to bid $1010 when someone else has already bid $1000.
But also the problem is sniping results in more impulse bids. Lord knows I’ve gotten into sniping wars and input bids that were more than I would have paid for the item had there not been 20 seconds left in the auction.
Yes, but letting others know early how high you’re willing to go can encourage others to adjust their maximum bid accordingly. If they don’t know they’re about to be outbid, they don’t get caught up in the emotional response.
ETA: Or what all the others above me just wrote while I was getting my coffee.
That’s why I use a sniping service rather than doing it manually. Best of both worlds - I can take my time to research and decide how much I’m willing to pay for it, but nobody else knows it until the last second. Also, if I change my mind later (after I’ve set up the automated snipe, but before the auction ends), I can lower my bid.
Auction sniping is an interesting case study in game theory, in that there’s no benefit to sniping if nobody else is doing it (due to the proxy bidding), but if there is a significant population of snipers already, it becomes beneficial for everyone else to snipe, too. No, it won’t affect whether or not you get the item, but it can affect what price you pay when you do.
Just FTR, there are some people that dispute that things are quite that simple.
(A previous eBay sniper thread got semi-hijacked by me on this point. I don’t care about getting flamed but I don’t want to hijack again. So I’ll leave it at that).
I’ve noticed that when this item went under 24 hours to go this morning, the clock now includes seconds.
This last is of no interest to anybody but me, but what the hell… it’s my thread. 
Also, logged onto EZ-Sniper and created an account. That collection of world-wide Macarena versions is mine, Mine, MINE!!!
Or, well, hers, Hers, HERS!!!.
One of the major benefits of sniping is, as others have said upthread, that it prevents emotion-driven bidders from nibbling away at the would-be sniper’s winning bid (which would cause him/her to pay more than necessary to win the auction). This is true whether or not any other bidders are sniping.
I could have said that better-- What I meant was that it would be pointless if all the other bidders were bidding rationally.
Yeah, so it’s this that I dispute.
I may as well go into the arguments now, since everyone is going down this road…
Firstly, in most cases there is no exact point dividing “price I would be happy to pay” and “price I would be happy to walk away from” (a notable exception is the trivial case where you already know an item retails for X elsewhere). All there is is decreasing happiness to buy and increasing happiness to walk away as price increases.
But there must be a point where you’re 100% happy to walk away, right?
Well, of course, but it doesn’t make sense as a strategy to always bid such a high amount.
If you were only going to take part in one auction in your life, then fine.
But otherwise to bid high every time is very risky. In the worst case all your transactions will cost you the maximum and leave you with nagging doubts (bearing in mind this is the point where your “happiness to buy” is at its absolute minimum).
Secondly it’s all based on a simplistic idea of what the utility of an item is to us, and how we convert that into a quantity of currency. Again, I think people make the mistake of confusing the price they know an item sells for elsewhere, with its utility.
When I say “I won’t pay more than $3 for my brand of ground coffee”, I mean that I know roughly what I can buy it for elsewhere. But if there were a worldwide shortage of coffee, and the price doubled, I’d probably still buy it (though my consumption would probably go down).
Actually putting an exact price on what coffee is worth to me, is very difficult.
In conclusion sniping is a useful (possibly unfair) strategy against rational bidders too.
Sniping is only useful against two things: a) shill bidders, and b) bidders who let other people decide how much they’re willing to pay, rather than deciding that for themselves.
Mijin said:
But if you bid on an auction at all, that’s exactly what you’re doing, by definition. You decide at what bid point you’ll drop out - in other words, you put a price on what the item’s worth to you. The only question is whether you can decide that for yourself, or whether you need to see what other people bid before you can make that decision.
If you can decide it for yourself, then you won’t nibble - you’ll just put in your proxy bid, either early or late. And no one - sniper or not - will be able to beat you unless they’re willing to pay more than you are. On ebay, timing doesn’t actually matter - it’s not the *last *bid that wins. It’s the *highest *bid.
If you can’t decide it for yourself - if you need to see your $30 bid outbid by someone else’s $31 before you can decide ‘Well, actually, it’s worth $32 to me’ - then you’ll nibble.
Nibblers are vulnerable to snipers, because they don’t get that chance to say ‘Well, if he bid $31, maybe I actually would pay $32.’ Snipers are vulnerable to early proxiers, because in the case of a tie, the early bidder wins. And early proxiers are vulnerable to nibblers. It’s a game of paper-scissors-stone.
No. See what you’ve done there is equate “point you drop out” with “what the item is worth to you”. They aren’t the same thing.
In the coffee example, I might set my max for this particular shopping trip at $3 for various reasons. But really a jar of coffee has greater utility to me than that.
And likewise in auctions, I pick a value where I’m getting a good deal – nowhere near the “break even” of utility and price. And that means if I lose an auction by 10c I can rightly be disappointed. There’s nothing irrational in that.
Since you are new to the sniping thing, here are some tips that have not been mentioned in the current thread:
Avoid bidding nice round numbers. Many inexperienced bidders will bid say $50.00 if the going rate for the item is about that. If this is the case, then you can win the auction with a bid of 50.01, even though the bid increment is more than .01. Many bidders think you have to stick to bid increment amounts, but you don’t. As long as your bid is at least one increment above the current bid (not the proxy price) then it will be accepted, and a full increment is not required to be considered the high bid when the auction closes. If I were bidding on an item that typically goes for around $50 I’d probably snipe at, say $51.73 This will beat a $50 bid, a $51 bid, and a 51.50 bid. It is not surefire, and it is easy to overthink it, but it does sometimes work. I’d say about 1/5 of the auctions I have won have been by only a few cents, including a laptop computer that was several hundred dollars.
Also, late bidding is good, but it is not a case of later is better. I try not to time my snipe too close to closing, meaning like 5-10 seconds, rather than 2 seconds. You just need to be late enough that an emotional bidder or shill can’t react based on your bid. There will typically be other snipers, and if one gets in before you with a bid within less than a price increment, then your bid will not be accepted. So there is a bit of an advantage to being one of the earlier snipers, rather than the last one…you can block higher snipes up to one bid increment above your max price. I have been on the losing end of this several times, but there is no way to know when you are on the winning end, because you never see the rejected bids.