This has been hammered around so many times on the SDMB. The final consensus is: Incorrect. Sniping (either manually or through a program) with YPM is the best way to do it. You avoid people who bid just to bid, owners who violate rules and bid their auctions up when they are extremely active, and you don’t draw attention to your desired item by increasing its price.
As a seller, there isn’t a lot you could do to stop people sniping (except starting your auctions at the precise moment that makes them end at the start of the eBay scheduled downtime for maintenance - but even this wouldn’t do you any good because it would just prevent the sniped bids coming in, making the final selling price even lower.
There is also sniping software that will run on your own computer. The advantage of this is that you don’t have to give away your password to a web site. The disadvantage is that you have to leave a computer running all the time, and it works better if you have a broadband connection.
One sniping program is esniper. I like it, but I’m biased because I wrote it. It is free and open source. If you are comfortable with running command-line programs, it may be useful to you. Somebody wrote a GUI for it, but I don’t think it has been generally released, yet.
One of the features is that you can set up esniper to bid on a bunch of auctions, stopping when it has bought the correct number of items. For instance, you want a digital camera; you find 20 auctions selling the camera, then tell esniper to snipe these 20 auctions until it wins one camera. Or for another example, let’s say you’ve got an obsolete laser printer, and you want up to 5 cartridges for it. You can setup esniper to bid on a bunch of auctions, and stop when it has won 5 cartridges.
One minor clarification: bidding YPM with minimal time left in the auction is the best way to do it, and it doesn’t require any software. However, software can make bidding with minimal time left more convenient, as you don’t have to remember when the auction ends and arrange to be at an internet-connected computer at that time.
Others have already pointed out why bidding YPM early is a bad idea (bid-up by folks who don’t know their own PM, shill bidding, etc).
For me, so be it. When I place my maximum bid of $30.00 for something, I mean it. If I am outbid early or at the last minute, I just shrug. There’ll be another auction soon enough.
The only advantage I see in sniping is that you have the option of retracting your bid up until the last second.
…and not be stung by fraud, and save money.
If in this auction rubyredfire had placed his original bid of $800 with a few seconds remaining, he would likely have got the camera for $730, or maybe even $710. That’s about 10% less than his original “high” bid.
And who’s to say that coffeetraveler isn’t a shill bidder (i.e. somebody working with the seller). A sure sign of a shill is a late bid retraction by one bidder, then another late bid by another bidder just under rubyredfire’s maximum. That didn’t happen in this auction, perhaps because rebyredfire was such a sucker. That’s not to say that coffeetraveler isn’t a shill – he very well could be. A possible sign of a shill is coffeetraveler’s bidding history. This is the only auction coffeetraveller has bid on, and those bids were almost two weeks ago. Does it seem reasonable that somebody would place a zillion bids on a Canon D30 (of which there are a bunch for sale every week), then not bid on anything else?
My very first experience with ebay was a shill bid incident. I wanted a nice black and white sports picture. $5.00. The shill kicks to $6.50. I come back and win the bid with $7.50.
Now I did some research on the shill bidder. Seems that the vendor and the shill bidder both lived in the same town (surprise surprise). It also is interesting to note that the shills “wins” were only on items my seller sold, and this indicated to me that these were the bids that the shill had just gone too high, and made the real buyer shy away. The Shill is stuck with a prize that he will more than likely give back to himself and relist on ebay… Also surprising is the glowing feedback that is given between the divided personality ebayer. Always glowing. I wish I could find this example to post it, but alas, it’s gone.
Full disclosure: I used to work at AuctionSniper, writing code for it (and I made the blue logo too–I wanted to make it sniper-scope green, but we would have had to change the whole website color scheme). I am no longer affiliated with them at all other than the fact that I still use the service.
You could ask their forums, but last I knew, every snipe was placed irrespective of any other snipe.
Some plusses of online services over programs that run on your home machine (based on my experience with/at AuctionSniper): [ul][li]redundancy–if your home machine or connection goes down, you’re screwed. AuctionSniper doesn’t rely on a single machine or connection. []latency–if your connection to eBay gets slow, you may miss a snipe. AuctionSniper adapts snipes to eBay latency, and the primary servers are physically close to eBay’s servers. []upgrades–if eBay changes their layout, AuctionSniper quickly adapts to the changes. []uptime–if your machine crashes, you will miss a snipe. Online servers are montored closely for uptime so you don’t have to worry about it.[/ul]Some plusses for a program running on your own machine: [ul][]Cost–may be free [*]Username/password–Kept on your machine [/ul]At least with AuctionSniper, you only pay if you win the auction. Also, your personal information was treated as sacred when I was there. And I vividly remember that everyone was against the idea of selling the user database (name/email) ever. Your username/password are needed to place bids w/eBay, but that’s the only reason they’re used. I know that I never buy on eBay without using AS.[/li]
On AuctionSniper that’s called bidgroups, and I agree that’s one of the neatest features of any sniping service/program.
[QUOTE=emarkp]
Some plusses of online services over programs that run on your home machine (based on my experience with/at AuctionSniper): [ul][li]redundancy–if your home machine or connection goes down, you’re screwed. AuctionSniper doesn’t rely on a single machine or connection. []latency–if your connection to eBay gets slow, you may miss a snipe. AuctionSniper adapts snipes to eBay latency, and the primary servers are physically close to eBay’s servers. []upgrades–if eBay changes their layout, AuctionSniper quickly adapts to the changes. uptime–if your machine crashes, you will miss a snipe. Online servers are montored closely for uptime so you don’t have to worry about it.[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
I’m not jumping on your experience, just injecting a bit of differing opinion. If you run an old Windows box with shaky drivers that blue-screens twice daily and/or you are on a dialup connection, there’s little question that a sniper service would be a better choice for you (at least until you can snipe a real computer and get reliable internet service!).
Redundancy depends on the actual configuration of the sniping service vs. your home service. Without knowing the details of a sniping service’s setup vs a home/school/business user with a sniping program, you can’t say which one has better redundancy (although you’d hope a sniping service has done their homework). There can always be single points of failure that you haven’t thought of, that blows away any redundancy you thought you had. My favorite example was the day that Minnesota was blown off the internet by a bunch of homeless people http://www.gimonca.com/personal/archive/burnin.html. It’s not good to place your primary and backup fiber under the same bridge!
Any old program can figure out latency. Placing a bid on eBay is a 2-step process. My sniping program does the first step 2 minutes before the bid time, then figures out the latency based on how long step 1 took. If you are a bidding service placing bids a few times a minute, you’ll have a better handle on latency, but typically not by much.
eBay “upgrades” are the reason I open-sourced my program. I’d gotten tired of losing auctions because of changes at eBay, so now that I have more users and everybody can look at the source, when eBay makes a change it won’t put people out of commission too long. However, I’m sure an auction service is much quicker to react than me, simply because I’ve got better things to do that to put out a new release, and for an auction service it is the only thing they have to do.
Uptime circles back to redundancy. You can run my sniper on any operating system that has a unix-like API (including Windows and MacOS X), and you can run multiple instances of the sniper, from completely different places if you like. Does AuctionSniper have backup servers, and if so, are they of a different architecture/OS so that whatever took down the main server has less of a chance of also taking down the backup(s)? uptime on the box I normally run snipes (a sparcstation 5 that I also use as my web/ftp/ssh server) is currently 111 days, but that’s only because I moved. Prior to that it was up for about 2 years straight.
Sniping, bah. I wish eBay would automatically extend auctions when someone places a bid in the final minutes (which Yahoo Auctions does, I believe), so people would go back to bidding the way auctions are supposed to work.
Yes, I’d like to see eBay be as successful as Yahoo! auctions. :rolleyes:
There have been other auctions that did the “will only close when no bids have been received for 5 minutes” rule. One of the first online auction sites, OnSale, did this. However, eBay has succeeded with its current format, and isn’t likely to change to a format that has not proven itself successful.
The way I deal with things is “you tell me the rules, I’ll play the game”. I might not necessarily play the game you intended me to play, because the rules may be open to strategies that you didn’t think of. If and when eBay changes its rules, I will change my strategy. It’s the hacker ethic – no, not the popular media version of hacker-as-criminal, the traditional techie version where you use things in ways nobody intended.
Surely you aren’t suggesting that eBay’s success is due to last-minute bidding. Most bidders don’t snipe - just look at how many auctions with bids still have hours or days to go.
eBay has made changes in the past to put an end to certain tactics that circumvented their fees and features. For example, if you wanted to sell an item for no less than $100, it used to be cheaper to give it a low starting bid and set the reserve at $100 than to just set the starting bid at $100.
Sniping doesn’t directly cheat eBay out of any money, but it does make a number of eBay features useless - why have automatic proxy bidding if people are just going to bid their maximum at the last minute? Why have a choice between 3, 5, 7, and 10 day auctions if bidders wait until the last few seconds?
eBay is well aware of sniping, and have been for years. It’s pretty clear that either they don’t care, or they count it as a positive. Proxy bidding works just fine with sniping, in fact snipers depend on proxy bidding, otherwise sniping wouldn’t be so useful. As for why the choice on 3, 5, 7, and 10 day auctions, I assume some people want to turn inventory faster, and others want to give their item more exposure before the item is sold. Again, I don’t see what this has to do with sniping, other than I generally check eBay once a week for tings to snipe on, so if you sell somthing on a 3 or 5 day auction there’s a decent chance I’ll completely miss it.
Auto-extending an auction has been tried and failed, because it turns everybody into a sniper of the manual sort with a 5 minute window and no proxy. You’ve got to sit by your computer with 5 minutes left in the auction, then up your bid as necessary ad infinitum. When I tried OnSale way back when, some auctions (especially dutch auctions) could go on for another hour. It destroyed proxy bidding because you’d want to bid just one increment above the 2nd highest, so the 2nd highest couldn’t come back and run up your proxy right away.
Here’s a page on myths of sniping: http://www.moyen.org/snipe/myths.html
Here’s another, with a quote from an eBay rep (in red, about 2/3 down the page): http://www.geocities.com/stevesheriw/ae.htm
Or, considering that plenty of auctions still get bids before the last few minutes, maybe it just isn’t common enough yet for them to care.
Really? When has eBay had that feature?
Well, those aren’t the greatest arguments, but at least they’re trying. I like the bit about how only millionaires and welfare cases will benefit from auto-extensions, because only they have the free time to sit around pressing Reload; I guess the authors have never heard of email or pagers. 
But it seems the sniping debate has gone on longer than I realized, with no end in sight, and I shouldn’t have dragged it in here. Sorry for the hijack.
I have an idea, though I haven’t put it into practice yet: “Attention, would-be snipers: I will close this auction early. How early, you ask? Maybe a few minutes, maybe several hours. Who knows! All I can say is if you’re reading this listing, and I haven’t closed it yet, the time to bid is NOW.”
Of course for 95% of the things sold on ebay theres always another seller.
Never, they learned from others mistakes.
Email isn’t instantaneous. Depending on your ISP, email can be delayed 15 minutes or so on a routine basis, and more (days!) if a server is down. Pagers are wonderful, especially if you are in a meeting, playing in the park with your kids, or it is 3:00am where you live (remember, eBay is world-wide). Making auctions convenient for only a small segment of your audience (those who will be available at close) can significantly reduce the number of bidders.
No problem.
…or never. Guess which one I’d pick? 