There’s not much difference. If you are the current highest bidder at an auction and haven’t yet bid your maximum but then walk away before the end, assuming no one will outbid you before the hammer falls, more fool you.
Plus you get lots of bidders who wait to see what the price level is before starting to bid - if a seller is aware that a particular item is in high demand, they might increase the starting prices / reserves on similar future items.
- See item I like.
- Put my max bid in.
-or-
- See item I like.
- Specifically set a time to come back to eBay to put my max bid in.
- Do that.
-or-
- See item I like.
- Research a sniping program I trust with my information.
- Download that or register for it.
- Give them my information, bid item, etc.
Yeah, I realize I only have to set it up once. But it’s still going to be an extra step. Your statement is disingenious.
There’s all the difference in the world.
Fortunately there are people who don’t realise that which enable the rest of us to get bargains. 
Well, obviously but that has no bearing whatsoever on the difference between Ebay and Christies.
Wow, you know a lot about the bit of googling I did about four years ago.
Jane bids $14. Sniper John (who isn’t sniping this time), who presumably actually wants to purchase said doll, bids his maximum ($15), as suggested. Jane says “Hey, 15.01 ain’t much difference.” Since the advice to bid your max, in this case $15, John doesn’t get the item for essentially the price he was willing to pay.
Next time round the sniper comes out, Jane doesn’t get a chance to place her 15.01, John wins. Hence the point of sniping.
Yes, like most things doing the job in the optimal way isn’t necessarily the one that is the least work. It’s the one that gets the best balance between work and results.
In this instance over the course of a decent sample of bids sniping will:
- Mean you actually get more of the items on which you bid.
- Mean that you pay less than you would otherwise have paid.
If you are only bidding trivial amounts or only ever going to bid in a very small number of auctions, by all means do it another way.
But if you are bidding on a lot of items and/or items of a reasonable value you are a fool not to use automatic sniping.
Well, a key difference is that the auctioneer on TV will extend the “end time” of the auction after a bid by saying, “do I hear $200? Ok $200 from the gentlemen in the back. Do I hear $300? $300? Going once… going twice… sold.”
With auctions like that, you don’t have to bid your “true maximum” because you always have another chance to reconsider and rebid during the “going once going twice” announcement.
If a person has been conditioned by those type of auctions, I guess I can see how they’d be beaten by snipers.
Ebay works differently. You have to submit your true maximum bid to have the best chance at winning the auction. In terms of actually winning, it doesn’t matter if that true maximum is submitted on day 1 or day 7. The only thing that changes is the final amount you pay. (The final amount is affected by the losing bidders driving up the price.)
What sometimes happen is that Janie values the doll at $1 million but only keeps that amount in her brain. She doesn’t actually submit it to ebay – she only enters a bid of $14.00 hoping to get it for that amount. The ebay proxy system doesn’t know that Janie could actually bid $999,986 more than that.
The key is that Janie must inform ebay of that $1 million max ceiling in her head. If she does, even if a hundred snipers on day 7 submit last second bids, it doesn’t matter. All of them lose.
Say I want to buy a rare item. The auction was just listed for $1and my max is $250. I would place an early bid of $200 and snipe at $250.
My reasoning is that an early significant bid will discourage some potential bidding-war bargain hunters from placing a bid at all, and they won’t be around to get caught up in one on the final day. It should also give some time for naive bidders to have a less passionate slow-speed bidding war. And if the current bid is $300 with 3 days to go I can move on.
Am I wrong?
Yes. Because your early bid of $200 is going to appear as a $1 bid until people start chipping at it. It’s not discouraging early bid-wars at all - it IS an early bid war.
So you fell into a weird alternate google universe where people who snipe told you they did it for giggles and not to gain any advantage, and told you the best method of winning on ebay was not to snipe, while making it clear what they did was snipe.
I’ve been participating in discussions on this topic for years. I have never heard anyone say these things, but whatever. Despite your weird and anomalous experience, a representative sample of people who snipe do not say these things.
John was outbid. Someone was willing to pay more than his maximum. Can’t complain about that. Or do you mean that actually he would have been willing to pay $15.02? If so, he didn’t bid his maximum and can’t complain.
Maybe you don’t realize it but you’re changing the scenario to not match the advice about “bid your maximum”.
In your version, Jane’s bid of $14 is not her true maximum. It can’t be because you just said she later submitted $15.01. If Jane withheld that difference of $1.01 in her brain and not told ebay about it, then she did not follow the advice “of bid her max.” In this case, Jane had time to rectify her mistake of not bidding her true max earlier and John lost the auction.
And John lost this auction because he didn’t bid his true maximum which might have been $15.02 or $16 or maybe $20.
Again, in this version, John won not because he sniped Jane; he won because Jane did not submit her true maximum bid. Basic math still trumps sniping.
If Jane submitted her TRUE maximum of $1 million, she doesn’t have to place her $15.01 bid. She has additional margin of $999,985 that ebay proxy system will use up on her behalf. This totally negates the point of sniping.
It doesn’t matter if John submits his $15 bid 1 nanosecond before the end of the auction giving Jane zero time to submit her new $15.01 bid (actually, it would need to be $15.50). The ebay proxy system will still declare Jane the winner. The true max bid still trumps the timing of snipes. It always has and always will.
The advice to “just bid your maximum and it’s all good” is still fundamentally and mathematically correct. Sniping doesn’t change that at all.
Btw, I think you’re try explain an aspect of sniping that many of us already understand. My earlier post to you and Princhester was about emphasizing the limitations of sniping. Sniping has been oversold as the key to winning. It’s not the sniping that wins, it’s the highest bid amount.
Yes, sniping does happen to take advantage of other inexperienced bidders submitting incremental bids that ultimately lose. However, that’s not what I was talking about. I was emphasizing “just bid your maximum and it’s all good” as factually true. You seemed to think that sniping negates it.
Amazing, word for word. Where are you getting this stuff?
What is more important, the one cent (or other minimal) difference, or actually winning the auction?
eBay make huge profits on people saying “ah heck, what’s another $0.20, $2, £5000 etc”.
This is something I’ve had to work with my wife on - we actually lose quite a lot of sniped bids, simply because the bidding went over our maximum. But I gain in that I don’t pay more than I wanted to for an item simply because I (or more often my wife) got caught up in the excitement of bidding.
My missus is eBay’s dream customer - she’ll keep on bidding over what she originally intended, using exactly the rationale you give.
I have to keep pointing out that you should always decide what you’d pay if a “buy it now” offer were available, and stick to that value.
If it goes beyond that price just let it go, as you’d already decided it wasn’t worth that much.
Winning the auction for what I want to pay is important. My maximum bid is what I am willing to pay for the item, not what I might pay if someone else thinks it is worth a little more. (If someone else thinks it is worth a *lot *more, their bid will still be only one increment higher than my max.)
In terms of winning the auction, that one cent difference is just as good as a $1,000 difference. Ebay doesn’t declare the winner based on the intentions hidden in your brain, it’s based on the math of actual bids. An actual bid of $15.01 is higher than a $15.02 that was inside the head of a competing bidder but was never submitted.
If that one cent was truly a minimal difference as you say, then John should have submitted $15.02 and not $15.01. If it’s a minimal difference between $15.02 to $15.03, he should bid $15.03.
There are 99,998,499 minimal differences of a penny in between $15.01 and $1,000,000.00. Somewhere in that range is the TRUE maximum John is willing to pay. One of those differences of just a penny is the magic breaking point for John.
Maybe it’s the 1-cent difference between $15.03 to $15.04.
Maybe it’s the 1-cent difference between $15.99 to $16.00.
Whatever that TRUE threshold amount happens to be for John, that’s what he needs to bid. If it’s high enough, his bid will totally negate sniping.
You are missing the point.
In this example he loses the item. Had he sniped he would have got it for $14.50.
So by not sniping he missed an item he wanted. Seemples!
Of course.
Sniping only gives you an advantage where you are bidding against people who will continue to make new bids when they are outbid.
If confers no advantage whatsoever against those who bid their maximum, whether they snipe of not.
However, since there are actually a lot of people who will keep upping their bid, sniping is the optimum method for intelligent bidders.
No, I believe Princhester was addressing the same issue I was: the validity of the Cugel’s statement, “just bid your maximum and it’s all good”
That’s the limited context of his particular response.
I’m quite sure that Princhester is well aware of how sniping works.
I agree but Cugel was trying to pass off “just bid your maximum and it’s all good” as bad advice. It’s not bad advice. It’s mathematically correct.
Sorry.
I seem to be losing track of everyone’s underlying position.
Some people seem to have an odd definition of “maximum,” being willing to bid over *their *maximum if and only if they see someone who has a higher maximum.