I don’t understand, Munch. Looking at that page, it appears that 73 put in a $17.50 bid at 8:17:15, and then dl nibbled away at it from 12:04:08 to 12:05:46 (Let’s try $10.79 - damn, outbid. Let’s try $11.79 - damn, outbid) until he finally ended up with a high bid of $17.89, which beat out the bid that 7***3 put in almost four hours earlier. Then, two minutes later, **Maggie **sniped it.
Am I misreading something?
Any scenario where you want to know the other bidders’ max ceiling amount to use as knowledge/insight into a item’s worth. You would RATIONALLY “chip away” to find this information out. You rationally do this because you realize you won’t necessarily win the item but you “win” new information. This in itself can be valuable for other auctions you intend to “snipe” instead of “chip away” at.
How many hours do you spend on all this work?
I’m highly lazy, so I place one bid for my maximum and check back once a day. Stuff I bid on isn’t in high demand, so usually I win the auction for far less than my maximum.
Absolutely. I think people can cobble together “lose a few bucks per transaction” with “multiple transactions” and come out with “lots of cash”, don’t you? One last time:
I am not proposing that people not snipe.
Sniping is a fantastic money-saving eBay strategy.
Does that make it clear enough? Jesus Christ…
[quote=“Gary “Wombat” Robson, post:41, topic:552270”]
I don’t understand, Munch. Looking at that page, it appears that 73 put in a $17.50 bid at 8:17:15, and then dl nibbled away at it from 12:04:08 to 12:05:46 (Let’s try $10.79 - damn, outbid. Let’s try $11.79 - damn, outbid) until he finally ended up with a high bid of $17.89, which beat out the bid that 7***3 put in almost four hours earlier. Then, two minutes later, **Maggie **sniped it.
Am I misreading something?
[/QUOTE]
Yes - it’s only showing high bids, not individual bids that don’t win. Any “nibbling” that takes place is going to continue to show the original “max bid” bidder until that max bid is exceeded.
If I put in a $100 bid on Day 1, and you start to chip away at it until you get the high bid, it’s going to look like this (most recent descending to Day 1):
Gn $101
Mh $99
Mh $95
Mh $91
Mh $87
Mh $86
Mh $84.17
Mh $81.88
Mh $72
Mh $69
Mh $68
Mh $67
M***h $0.05
Dunno - most of the time, I think the people complaining just plain don’t understand what’s going on and they emotionally judge that there’s something unfair or morally wrong happening. People complain about all sorts of things they don’t understand - I’ve seen sellers complaining about the number of watchers they get, compared to the number of bidders. (I’ve seen some idiots rant about this in their listings. Heh.)
Sensible advice for online auctions with a fixed end time is: bid late, bid once, bid your max and be prepared to walk away emptyhanded if you are outbid. Sniping just allows you to let a machine do this for you by proxy.
Damn - you’re right, it does show all the bids. Either way, it wouldn’t have mattered - 73 put in a bid of $17.50 on Sep-01-10 08:17:15 PDT, which dl chipped on. If it wasn’t for that damn chipper d***l, Maggie would have saved $0.39!
LOL yeah, he didn’t cost me much - but that’s because I sniped.
If I’d put in an earlier proxy bid, I believe he would’ve nibbled it up much higher, maybe even won.
I haven’t bought from ebay in several years, but I used sniping for many of the “experienced bidder” points listed here, but also as a way to bid, without actually telling ebay about it.
Like Chessic Sense’s example, I would often be after something that had multiple items for sale. So I would set snipes at my maximum price for all of the items, and forget about it. If I win one, all future snipes are canceled. If I’d put my maximum price in for all of the items I could have possibly won several. If I’d waited to put in bids on the next item as I lost the finishing ones, I’d have had to sit on ebay all day.
This worked great when I bought my old cell phone. Several stores would routinely list a few phones per day at $.99, and they’d sell for $70-100. Every morning I’d put in snipes for the newly listed phones at $75 or so, and after a few days I won at that price.
And similarly I’d use snipes as a way to “cancel” a bid. Because all I’d done was enter my price into my sniping software, I could change my mind and remove my maximum bid anytime before my snipe fired.
Definitely not true. Perhaps you always bid on commodity items, but I rarely find multiple identical items. Most of what I buy (and I don’t spend that much time on eBay) is unique: signed collectible books, large lots of items, and so forth.
I use a free sniping program that lives on my own computer, and nothing could be easier. Enter my max bid based on what the item has sold for in the past (completed listings), come back after it’s over. I can even have multiple auctions for the same item lined up in case I don’t win the first one; it’ll bid on subsequent auctions until I win, then quit. It wouldn’t even be detrimental if everyone sniped; I think it would keep auction winning bid prices down overall - no irrational bidding wars anymore.
If everyone sniped, that would essentially be a Vickrey auction. Why doesn’t eBay go to a Vickrey auction? Partly because sellers like irrational bidding wars.
As qpw3141 has noted, these are possibly sensible statements if you bid only on low-value items - not otherwise.
And you have implied that sniping costs extra time, whereas in fact it’s about the most time-efficient way to bid.
I was just wondering why you repeatedly told us that it would only save you a few nickels and was pointing out that for some items the savings could be a lot more dramatic. I’m not quite sure why it’s something to get so tetchy about. 
As does Ebay. Anything that puts up the prices has to be good for them.
I have wondered why they don’t try and stop automated sniping but realised that they would probably instantly lose a good proportion of their buying customers.
One other advantage of sniping (which has been alluded to upthread) is that it allows you to schedule multiple bids in a cascade even if you’re not around.
So in the example of the Madden NFL game, there could be a bunch of titles (e.g. 5 of them) all finishing within 2-3 hours of each other in the middle of the day.
I’m at work with no access to eBay (and/or I’m busy), but I don’t want to enter a standard bid on all 5 items as there’s a chance I’ll win them all and end up with 5 copies.
So I add all the items to the snipe tool with the maximum bids for each one: the first auction finishes and I’m outbid above my maximum, so the tool automatically starts monitoring the next item due to finish. That too goes above my maximum bid, so the tool moves on to the third item.
This time I win the auction at a price at or below my maximum bid, and the snipe tool then cancels my interest in the remaining two items.
Add to this the benefit of the last-minute bid (which is effectively a “sealed best-and-final offer” auction) and snipes tools are hard to beat.
Still.. when I first tried it out, I was turned off by being constantly sniped, and gave up.
A further annoyance was the snipers refusing to admit they did it to gain an advantage (unlike this thread). They’d say “Just bid your maximum and it’s all good” whilst simultaneously ignoring their own advice.
Though after a couple of years when I did come back (as I actually wanted something) I manually sniped as well. Got a bargain too.
You appear to be missing one of the subtleties. Snipers don’t snipe just as some sort of weird eccentricity, they do it to gain advantage and I don’t believe any have said to the contrary to you. Nor do I believe any sniper has given you advice that the best method is to bid your maximum without sniping. In my experience snipers invariably are advocates of sniping and they are advocates precisely because they believe (correctly) that it gains advantage.
I suspect what snipers were saying to you (which is precisely correct) is that you had no cause to complain because they would not gain advantage over *you * if *you *bid your maximum before the end of the auction. Snipers would never deny that they gain advantage over sheeple who will not bid their maximum until they have seen that someone else is bidding a similar amount.
[quote=“Princhester, post:58, topic:552270”]
I don’t think it’s necessarily fair to call people like that ‘sheep’.
A lot of people don’t really get that EBay is not a classic auction. They’ve seen auctions on the TV and in films and assume that using Ebay is a sort of simulation of that. So they get involved in all the ‘excitement’ of competitive bidding without realising that they are not getting maximum value that way.
The more intelligent will very rapidly realise that this method is sub-optimal and revise their strategy.
This sentence is worth repeating for emphasis.
What many of the complainers of sniping keep forgetting is that the sniper still has to have a max bid amount that beats everyone else. Just bidding at the last second guarantees nothing.
Let’s say there’s a 7-day auction for a Barbie Doll. The bid starts at $0.99 cents.
Stupid Bidder Janie thinks it’s worth $1,000,000 and therefore immediately submits her max proxy bid of $1 million down. On day 1, the auction will show a single bid of $0.99 cents.
Smart Bidder John comes across the same auction and sees Janie’s bid of $0.99 cents. He doesn’t realize she actually submitted a max bid of $1 million. John thinks he can snipe that doll for $15.00. He thinks nobody would pay more than $14.00 for it. He’s experienced and patient and therefore bides his time for 6 more days and plans to bid at the last second.
On day 7, 1 second before the auction ends, Smart Bidder John with his sophisticated sniping software automatically submits his bid of $15.00.
Well, Stupid Janie still won because $1 million is higher than $15.00. Janie actually gets the doll for $15.50 (the 50 cent bid increment in ebay’s proxy system).
Sniping cannot circumvent basic mathematics. The highest law of the jungle is still a maximum bid that beats everyone else. This overrides sophisticated sniping.
The only thing John did to Janie was cause her to pay $15.50 instead of 99 cents. It’s painful Janie had to spend $14.51 more than necessary but hey, she’s the one who actually won the item.
So when snipers suggest, “just bid your maximum and it’s all good” , they are correct as the above example shows.