Please explain the purpose of "sniping" (ebay)

On the other side of this, it’s usually/always worth a buck or two to me to just put my ideal bid in when I discover the item and let the chippers have their way, rather than have to schedule my life to log back in to place my bid at the last moment.

Correction: Sniping only protects the fact that you’re interested in the item. If you want to find out how much my Day 1 bid is, you’re going to have to chip away at it to find out.

That can mean you end up paying more or even losing the item.

And that’s why there are sniping sites (e.g. google ‘bidnip’). They allow you to set up your snipe and make the bid for you a few seconds before the end of the auction. No good for very cheap items because the snipes cost money.

Your day one bid is itself information about what you’re willing to pay (i.e. at least the amount of the bid). Other bids may come to chip away toward your maximum.

How are you worse off by holding that information to yourself?

For this, there exist sniping programs, programmed to send off a sniper bid at an exact time.

I’m afraid sniping rules.

“Manual” sniping is ineffective. In return for a small charge, the sniping services allow you to schedule a bid that will be placed at the last split second with no need for any further attention from you.

Correct - but I’m not paying more than my max price, so I’m still getting the item for a price I find reasonable.

No, it’s not. The only information a Day 1 bid gives is: I am interested in this item, and I am willing to pay the starting price. If I put in a $100 bid for a $0.05 item, all they see is I’ve bid $0.05.

Isn’t that what I said?

I’m afraid I made absolutely no argument against sniping. It does indeed rule - but there are plenty of logical reasons to not go through the trouble - which I provided.

Here’s a quick lesson why: Security Measure

This is a link to an auction I just sniped about 40 minutes ago (manually, at 11 seconds). I’m the top bidder. My True Max was $26.57, which is what I bid.

As you can see, in the 3 minutes before the auction ended, the ‘nibbler’ d***l drove the price up in $1 increments to $17.89. He stopped nibbling when he took the lead, about 1:15 before the auction ended.

Given his patterns, if I had bid my true max earlier, he probably would have continued to nibble at it up probably to $20 or more. Instead, since I didn’t give him that option, I was able to take it from him and still wound up paying $8 less than my proxy bid.

Do you see?

If I understand the above comments, the message I’m getting is that sniping allows you to gain an advantage of irrational bidders, and therefore, people who complain about sniping are irrational bidders. My strategy is such that I am not hindered by snipers, but may not be doing all I can to take advantage of the irrationals.

However I don’t understand this statement. I can see that automatic sniping is preferable since you don’t have to schedule your time, but I don’t see how it would fail to be effective. If I input my maximal bid 20 seconds before the end, I will have foiled any but the most ardent of the irrational bidders, and while I’m still subject to a more recent snipe, it will be my maximum versus his maximum at the end.

I hate to break this to you, Maggie - but dl wasn’t the nibbler, 73 was. His max bid was $16.79 which he put in at Sep-01-10 12:04:08 PDT. It was 73 who kept nibbling away (because why in the world would dl drive his own bid up?). d***l then came in with about a minute and a half left, bumped his max bid up, which you then sniped.

73’s top price was $17.50. dl’s was $17.89. Yours was $26.57.

Again: I’m not arguing against the logic and cost-savings of sniping. I’d just rather not go through the trouble to save a couple bucks.

Because it doesn’t assume there’s someone using sniping software, which plugs a bid in with about a second to spare. Your 22 second lead time might as well be a week.

It’s not necessarily irrational. But sniping is a way to discourage potential bidders who don’t have a clear idea of what the item is worth. The kind of bidder who thinks “I thought it was worth about $100, but I see it’s been bid up to $150 already so it must be worth about that much, I guess I’ll bid $160.”

Which is in fact useful information that you should not willingly put into the hands of other bidders.

Yes - but you seem reluctant to face the implication that increases in your bid provide further useful info to your competition.

I wouldn’t characterize the nibblers and chippers as always “irrational bidders.”

It’s more accurate to say that sniping optimizes the outcomes for ebay’s particular system of bidding that allows for multiple bids in a fixed window of time.

If another auction site were created with 2 different rules such as:
#1 – one and ONLY ONE bid could be submitted
#2 – all bids are blind – nobody knows each others bids
… sniping would not be effective at all.

Every auction system has a different optimal strategy. For ebay, sniping is the expert’s choice.

Useful? Yes. National security level important? No. I’m not going to lose sleep over a few bucks.

I think I’ve made it clear with nearly every post that not sniping at the last milisecond is costing me precious nickels, and that I’m okay with that.

Sure, but the sniper doesn’t have time to manually hem and haw over how much he thinks the item’s worth. He has to plug in his maximum bid into his sniping program. At that point it’s just my maximum vs his maximum. In a war of rational bidders who bid their max and only do so once, timing is irrelevant, and snipers are by definition those types of rational bidders.

It’s the rink-a-dinks who don’t know that they can let E-bay bid for them that sniping eliminates.

Good point, Buck.

What is the scenario in which multiple bids of less than your maximum (which could be sniped) more effective than a single bid at your maximum (which can’t be sniped).

You keep saying this over and over again.

It may be that you only ever buy very low value items (perhaps a dollar or so if you think you are only saving nickels), but if you are regularly buying items that cost £20-40 - sometimes several a day - the cost savings using sniping can be dramatic (although, of course, never actually quantifiable).

You’ve all got it wrong. It’s two sided:

  1. There are always duplicate items out there, each with their own price.
  2. People are more likely to bid on auctions ending sooner than later.
    Let’s say I want to buy a copy of Madden 10 for $15. There are 304 on auction right now for the PS3. That’s way too many, so I filter it down to auctions ending soonest and find that, say, four are ending in the next hour. Prices:

1.00
0.90
4.50
9.99

Which do you think I’ll bid on? The .90 one, right? And I’m willing to go to $15. So do I put in Max bid = $15? Hell no! If the bid gets that high, I want to go look for a cheaper game. So I just put in Max=$5. That doesn’t get me the prize, so now the prices are:

1.00
5.10
4.50
9.99

So I didn’t win that one. So I head over to the 1.00 one. Same thing happens. And again with the others. So now they’re all in the $5-$10 range. I repeat the cycle. And eventually win one for $13:

13.00 - winner!
10.15
13.45
15.00

So the guy that was previously winning the first game is now going “Bastard! He sniped me! One hour to go and he just swoops in a takes my game.” Everyone else is going “Bastard! He chipped me up out of spite!”

Nothing untoward happened here. It’s just that eBay doesn’t lump their identical products together, so instead of bidding on a lot of 6 games (where the top 6 bidders win), you have to jump from auction to auction, putting in tiny bets and look like you’re sniping. Had I just went into the first game and bid $15, then I’d be stuck with four games for at least $50, or I would have had to bid on an auction that’s not ending for a few days (only to lose in this manner anyhow), or risk paying much more than the other games, whose auctions would have closed in the single digits.

One thing eBay could do is have all auctions close at midnight. That effectively lumps in these four games with all the others that are ending that day, spreading the prices out “smoother” so that we don’t have one game going for $10 and another going for $15.

There are a bunch of other solutions, but they’re all worse than the problem (like only allowing one sale per day per item).