Or you could look at it as meaning that, unless you were forced up to your absolute maximum bid, you got the item for less than you really thought it was worth. At worst, you got it for exactly what you thought it was worth (assuming you were bidding dispassionately). Sounds like a win or a draw to me.
The main way to really lose an auction is to “win” when you could’ve gotten it for less. Because eBay effectively operates a second-price scheme, this problem is mitigated; you only pay what the second guy bid plus the bid increment, so you couldn’t have paid any less and still won.
On eBay the main way to suffer buyer’s remorse is to allow yourself to bid up past your true valuation. But if you’re under your personal valuation and have the item, I’d say you’ve won.
I’m puzzled on this too. I haven’t touched eBay in years except to deal with a few Buy It Now vendors, but when I last looked at it, I thought the point of their bidding system was that you could enter your max price, but that wasn’t necessarily your bid. So if you saw something for $1 and decided you’d pay $3 at most for it, you’d enter $3.00 but it would record your bid as $1.05 (or whatever the minimum interval was). If someone else put in a max bid at $2.00, the current bid would immediately jump to $2.05 because you’re willing to pay more than they. If someone tried to snipe the auction by bidding $2.10, thinking that was the limit, wouldn’t your bid just go up to $2.15 automatically?
Obviously sniping would work if the snipe bid was higher than your max bid, but that doesn’t seem like it would be the case very often. Am I wrong in how this works?
Sure, sniping wouldn’t matter if everyone bid that way. But a lot of people don’t bid their maximum bid; rather, they just make a series of incremental bids. Maybe they’re just fooling themselves about how much they’re willing to pay when they initially bid, or maybe they just get competitive when it looks like they might lose. When you snipe you don’t give the other bidders the necessary time to realize that maybe they actually do want to spend a bit more.
If it came directly to your email address without going through the ebay server, then they got it from the seller (probably with a “I just want to see if he’ll sell it to me” whine), which is highly unethical. Ebay should be told about this, and you should email the seller and complain to them about it. Responding is dangerous for a variety of reasons, unless you like purging viruses from your hard drive.
Sniping works because most people don’t really put the maximum amount they’re willing to pay into the proxy amount. Sometimes it’s because they get emotionally attached to a single auction and will get caught up in a bidding war. Sometimes it’s because they are also planning on sniping. Sometimes it’s for other reasons.
The fact is that for any given auction, there are often bidders who will bid a certain amount, then, later, if they’re not the high bid, up their maximum with a higher bid. Sniping prevents those people from realizing that they’re not going to win and bidding higher, which results in a lower price for the buyer.
As for why eBay doesn’t prevent this behavior, I can only assume that they think it leads to bigger profits for them. I can think of a few reasons this might be:
Increasing the number of auctions that go for a higher price would decrease people’s use of Reserve Prices, a service that eBay makes money on both by directly selling the Reserve Price option, and by relisting fees when an item fails to meet a reserve price.
Increasing the price of items would drive buyers away because they no longer feel like they’re getting a great deal.
The only time I did NOT snipe on eBay was my very first auction. If I buy something there, it’s because I can’t get it retail–not because I feel like having a “sporting” day at the virtual auction house.
In my experience, the people who bitch about sniping are either whiny assholes like those described in the OP, or certain members of hobbyist forums whose only passion other than building scale aircraft models is decrying “evolutionism” as a “pet theory” of durned libruls.
And I second reporting the seller to eBay and leaving an addendum to any feedback left about his/her disclosure of your email address to that loser.
It’s a bit of logical rethoric which posits that it’s impossible for Achilles to outrun a turtle, because both move at the same time : the instant Achilles reaches the turtle (time T), the turtle has moved forward. At T+1, Achilles moves forward again, to reach the point where the turtle is, but the turtle has moved again. Since the number of T instants is infinite, it’s impossible for him to take the lead. Or something like that, it’s somewhat convoluted and (obviously) absurd to begin with.
Zeno also posited that motion was a logical impossibility. What can I say, the guy had ample free time
Anyway, the poster’s point in invoking the Paradox was that if bidding lengthens the bidding window, it allows someone else to bid. And extend the window. For someone else to bid, ad infinitum. Of course this paradox is solved when the item has reached a price where no one wishes to bid further, but that kinda goes against the whole “using eBay to get impossibly good deals” concept.
I think he meant Zeno. I’m not entirely sure what it has in common with his paradoxes, except the vague idea of time and/or space increasing and/or decreasing.
Sniping also keeps you from getting emotionally involved and bidding more than you can afford to. I can’t even let myself window shop these days, cuz I end up seeing something that I WANT and then when I don’t get that I find something else to make up for it. But no one ever said I have impulse control.
Isn’t sniping a race to the bottom? Like buying an SUV so that you’ll cream the other guy in an accident, until everyone gets SUVs and we’re all back to square one. Will we ever reach a point where nobody bids and everybody snipes? Is that a good place to be? How does it work when multiple people try to snipe an auction? Who wins out? Does it depend on the software used? So many questions…
Same as without sniping, the highest bid wins. If I snipe an auction after another sniper, but my bid is lower than his, I lose.
It shouldn’t. Even if the sniping software allows you to select how close to the end of the aution to place the snipe, if you are not the high bidder, you will lose.
That’s a fair question. If everybody sniped, I would guess that prices would be lower, because everybody only bids once, and cannot become emotionally involved in the auction to the point where they would bid more than they originally intended. Good for buyers, bad for sellers.
Perhaps I should have phrased it better. I was wondering what would happen if two people sniped at the same time, say one second before end of auction, for the same amount. I suppose there will be a slight time difference in whichever reaches the server first, taking into account network latency and other factors.
If sniping were rampant, most people would leave it to the lowest allowable amount of time remaining (one second?) for the snipe. Imagine an item that had no bids but 50 people viewing with snipes set up to bid at the last second. Yes, most would be too low, but what if there 3, 4, 5 people bidding the same highest amount? I guess it almost becomes a lottery. Maybe it’s unlikely for such a scenario to occur with several identical high bids, but it’s an interesting hypothetical.
I think it would be a good idea for to extend an auction, perhaps by two minutes, if a bid is received in the closing minute, and have unlimited extensions. This helps out people who may not know what sniping is but are watching the auction close live on their PC. It’s also more in keeping with the ‘Going once…going twice…’ spirit of auctions.
I could have sworen ebay used to do this, but maybe I’m thinking of Yahoo as others have said.
The downside, for ebay, is if you know the auction ends in ten seconds and you’ve time for one bid then you’ll bid a decent maximum bid, if someone else does then the item will go for a lot. If you know the auction is extended then you’ll just bid the minimum to try and see if you have competition.
The fixed time and automatic bid-up-to-maximum should secure the best price for items that aren’t in a frenzied bidding war. Also it’s nice for sellers to know when their auction ends (for the small sellers who want to package everything that day and head to the post office).
As far as eBay is concerned, there is no “at the same time”. However those bids end up making it in to be tabulated, they are sequential. As for which one will actually be the “first” such bid, I’d guess it would be mostly up to luck which bid is routed faster. But there is a well-defined ordering on them.
Don’t fool yourself – the reason emails go through the Ebay system is that they want to keep you from completing the transaction offline, denying them their cut of the sale. Their business model is built on making sure that you can’t just call up the seller on the phone and make an offer without Ebay knowing about it.
(Our company has worked both as a partner of Ebay and a competitor to Ebay, this was one of the many things we butted heads about.)
