If so, how much do they cost, and have you had success with them?
Are there any free ones out there that are reliable? I’ve done some googling on this, and I found one free program. However, the sniping program needed my ebay password and name. This is an obvious requirement, but for some reason, this made me uncomfortable. I don’t know anything about this company, and to give out my information to a faceless website seems a bit risky to me.
I use auctionsniper at auctionsniper.com. It is a great program and the cost is minimal.
I believe the fee is 1% based on the price of the item with a .25 cent minimum and a 5 dollar maximum. The last item I purchased was a bloodstone ring for $305 dollars and my fee was $3.05. I was glad to pay it.
In the past 2 years I have had only one snipe that could not be placed because of a computer glitch and that is with over 100 snipes placed.
One more thing, if you don’t win the item the snipe cost nothing.
I have been buying and selling on Ebay since 1998. From my experience this service has saved me quite a lot of money.
Hope this helps
I second auction sniper. They require your password and username, but it’s not a biggie. If you’re REALLY paranoid, just make a dummy username/password that you can use for sniping. Most sells don’t care if you have 0 feedback until you get into the larger more expensive items.
I used HammerSnipe successfully for a while (it was free - I’m not sure if this is still the case) - I still buy stuff on ebay, but I haven’t bought anything outside of ‘Buy It Now’ for ages.
Sniping tools are good for buyers, but not so good for the sellers.
I never read the user agreement. But as a precautionary measure my paypal password is different then the one i gave them for my account. I however never get spam or anything from them. So, that it as you will. I have had no problems.
Lets say you set your snipe upperbound at 10 dollars. The auction ends at 5 dollars. Your snipe will go through at 5.xx where xx is the minimum bid increase – NOT 10 dollars.
now, let us say 3 people snipe. They have upperbound snipes set to 10, 15 and 20 dollars respectively. THe person with the 20 dollar upperbound snipe will win at 15.xx where xx is the minimum increase. This is because all 3 snipes will go through 15 would beat 10 and 20 would beat 15.
Sniping avoids bidding wars and instead lets the person whom is willing to pay the most win at the lowest possible price. Good for the buyer – bad for the seller.
In that case yes. You were simply willing to pay more, and therefore you win the auction.
Not everyone however places their maximum bid. Lots of people are actually willing to pay more for it. If you place your max bid those people may very well come along and and outbid you. This drives up the price. With a snipe however, they never have a chance to come back and outbid you.
It’s questionably unethical in my opinion. But I do it. Alls fair I suppose.
They submit your proxy bids at the latest possible moment, hopefully (for the buyer) avoiding any human competition - basically, with eBay’s proxy system, you risk playing your hand long before the game is over.
Neither do snipers; that’s why they lose a lot of auctions, when their snipe bid is less than someone else’s proxy bid, and there isn’t enough time to bid again.
This is true, I used both systems and soon realised that auctionsniper was best for me. I could decide on the maximum price I was prepared to offer, leave the bid with auctionsniper and forget about it. I never paid a penny more than necessary and it didn’t ramp up the price - as previously stated, good for the buyer, not so good for the vendor. But as it was my SIL who advised me of it’s existence, and she and my BIL are 100% Ebay traders and use it themselves, I had no qualms. It was free for me but it has been capped recently - 3 free auctions per month, after which you have to sign up for the Pro version.
They are very discrete and professional, communications are of a very high order, backtracking is excellent and accounts handling better than most banks. I haven’t bid on Ebay for some time now and things may not be quite the same but my experience was definately positive.
