Can you then please explain to me a situation where not sniping is an advantage? I’m been thinking of it and I havn’t had any success.
Please do so. I have never seen a “Lowballer” or “Nibbler” in the wild, and would love to have one pointed out to me, lest of all one that actually suggests their eBay technique is superior. In fact, I would suggest that such people know that their “method” is ineffectual and counterproductive, but still do it.
You are absolutely correct that the one flaw of sniping is the computer crash. But I’d place the odds on a bolt of lightning hitting a particular place at a particular moment to be roughly equivalent to, well, a bolt of lightning hitting a particular place at a particular time. (Additionally, people with slow computers know they have slow computers, and aren’t about to try to place a bid under a minute from closing.)
Sure it did - it raised the price. But that’s neither here nor there.
I agree that sniping is in theory the best bidding strategy, if you want to get items at the lowest price. However, as a frequent bidder on eBay I do it very rarely, because it involves too much organisation: you have to be online at the right time to bid the right amount, or you need to set up a sniping program to do it for you. For many f the things I bid on, even if I bid many days before the close of the auction, no one else bids. On other auctions that I bid early on, other people bid over my limit anyway. So I suspect that there’s only a relatively small number of auctions where I would win at a lower price if I sniped, and for me it’s not worth the effort.
How about if, when the all important auction is coming to a close… I have a burning desire to pick my nose instead of constantly refreshing my ebay screen waiting for the closing time to drop down to 10 seconds and enter my snipe bid. In this particular case, setting a proxy bid early, then having my evening free to pick and roll, is a distinct benefit.
Of course, if winning this one bid is the most important thing you have going… spend your time sniping (or pay esnipe to do it for you), I’ll be over here digging for gold.
Sniping is an optimum strategy for winning. That it may not be necessary to snipe to win on every occasion may well be true but that doesn’t mean that my first sentence is wrong.
this situation. You will notice that nobody wants to bid anymore until the last few moments. This means only people who want to put in high max bid (unlikely) or ditherers who have the time to spend on Ebay, will bid anymore. It is becoming increasingly difficult to sell anything - except with “Buy it now” or “Fixed price.” I try to put a resonable “But it now” price on everything so people can buy fast on impulse and not have to play games they dislike anyway. I have also been frustrated by a nasty feedback gimmick - really dishonest sellers will not leave buyers feedback until they see what the buyer says of them. If the buyer tells the truth, the underhanded seller hits him with a negative for no valid reason. I just had a creep who had not used a “reserve” price & I was the only bidder, and I won an item at about half of what he expected. So he just didn’t ship, then lied about it. Eventually gave me a refund, but when the item did not come after 75 days & he never proved he sent it, I put down a “neutral” and he responded with a dishonest “Negative.” I have only 2 negatives out of 310 or so, & both were from crooked creeps.
See the trouble with the whole Max Bid thing can be summarized in this…summary of a conversation between me and me GF:
GF: Gee, I really want this little MP3 player. It’s only 2 dollars.
Me: No, I’m sure the price will get driven up to a lot more before the auction ends.
GF: So what should I bid.
Me: Go ahead and put in the the most you are willing to pay for this mp3 player.
GF: Hmm, OK, $50.
Me: So if someone bids $50.50 you aren’t wiling to pay $51 for it?
GF: Well, yeah, I guess so. I’ll bid $51.
Me: So this thing isn’t worth $52 to you?
…
…[more of the same]
…
GF: Ok fine, I’ll bid $67.
Me: You won’t pay $68?
GF: I hate you.
Unless one is buying something to sell and make a profit, or unless you know how much you’d pay in a store (or online store) for the item – retail, saying our Max Bid is a little bit of a grey area. We don’t know exactly what our threshold is dividing the buy/not buy line. This is especially true for hard to find or one of a kind items because we can’t just say “oh yeah I can get that at Sears for $X”.
You gotta remember that there are an awful lot of green, newbie ebayers. More and more people are being turned onto ebay every day. If someone, like my GF above, doesn’t have me to harass them, they’re likely to bid the $50 for the item as it is their inital maximum. But when they suddenly get outbid by 50 cents they just think, “we’ll I guess I’d pay another dollar for it.”
A common retort to sniping is “If everyone just bid their max from the start, sniping would be pointless”. Which is true, but a) people are dumb and don’t do that, and b) even smart people like you and me sometimes don’t INHERENTLY know what our max is.
Well, if anything goes down= you, your computer, Ebay. EBay used to crash fairly often- I know it’s more stable now, but even a 1 minute “whoops” means your bid is gone. Same if either server crashes- and i know servers still crash often enough.
Then, the seller can withdraw or re-do the auction to a certain extent if it has no bids. Your “potential snipe” is not a bid. It isn’t uncommon for sellers to get nervous when there are no bids, and so when a buyer offers a reasonable amount “off eBay” some sellers jump at the chance. With my system- that won’t happen.
Finally, someone could go in there, pay the “buy it now” price, and you bid is never seen. I know the objection here- the snipers are going to say “well if I was willing to pay the BiN price, I’d just do that”. But not nessesarily. Let us say the item has a minimum bid of 1 cent. It has a BiN of $25. You’d pay $25- but you’d also think you could get it less, with any luck. Thus, you go to your favorite Sniping service, and enter a bid of 27.15. You could possibly win the auction and pay 1cent- but you are realisticly hoping for $20. Now, if meanwhile, after doing all that- some guy comes by and just pays the $25- even your potential high bid of 27.15 is never seen. OTOH, with my “bid now- with my Max”(and a bid the same as your-$27.15)- as soon as I bid- the BiN price goes away. I may win the auction for 1cent. More likely, that same guy will come along and place a bid of $25. But then I win with 25.25 or something like that.
And fianlly- let us take that situation- I bid 27.15- but that’s my secret. All you see is one lowball bid. You ‘snipe" for the same amount. I win- you lose- my bid was first. Your snipe not only has to be higher- but a whole increment higher.
Now, yes- sniping avoids a “bidding war”- so does my strategy. It is true I can be “nibbled”- but those dudes are rare. "Lowballers’ are no fear to me- nor to snipers, sure- UNLESS that Lowballer has his bid in, and the sniper fails to get his in!
and
All of these are unlikely. There’s no such thing as a perfect strategy in an ebay auction that will win every time. You’re going to luck out sometimes even when using optimal strategy. That doesn’t mean you’re not using optimal strategy.
Further, I have never had the problems you outline. Contrastingly, I would say that at least 50% of the auctions I have seen or participated in have involved people putting in a Max, then putting in a higher Max when their Max is no longer winning. In other words, they are deciding what their true Max is on the basis of market information provided to them by people like you. But not people like me.
Your strategy seems overly concerned with minor chances, and insufficiently concerned with real issues.
The BiN price is usually set beyond market (the price to which the auction will go). Only a silly seller sets a BiN that is lower than what they think the auction will achieve.
Sniping is an optimal strategy for obtaining something at the best possible price. If you’re willing to pay beyond market, it may well not be the best strategy.
The BiN price may on rare occasions be set below market, in which case I agree that your strategy is better. But it is just special pleading.
No your strategy doesn’t. It avoids a bidding war in which you actively participate, but it doesn’t avoid a bidding war against your Max, or between others, guided by your Max. In fact, by setting a high Max early, it provides the perfect battlefield for a bidding war.
Actually, I’ve never heard a rational defense of lowballing or nibbling. I have heard people say they do it, but those who do always admit that they don’t really have a logical justification for it.
If you aren’t going to be home when the auction ends, and for some reason you refuse to use an automated bidding service, then of course you wouldn’t be able to snipe. But there’s still no reason to nibble. You should just enter your maximum bid as late as possible in the auction.
In this case, if you’re the sniper, you should bid the minimum to take away the BIN option. Then have your real bid poised to snipe. This is also one way to reduce the chances of the seller removing the item before its official end time due to no bids. But of course, this does not remove the risk of a seller deleting an item at any time. As all veteran eBay buyers know, sellers can remove items from sale with impunity, while bidders can only retract bids for just cause.
From the standpoint of maximizing your chances of winning at a price that is acceptable to you, sniping is the way to go. Eventually, all smart bidders realize this and join the ranks of snipers.
Of course, in the limit of sniping, where a person decides what the maximum they want to bid for an item is, and incrementing their bid to be just over what the current maximum bid at the moment is, you wind up with a Vickrey auction, where the person with the winning bid in a sealed auction pays the amount bid by the runner-up. Which would be fair to everyone, no matter how fast their net connection is, and would give the seller the honest market value of the item.
Does eBay offer the ability for a seller to hold a Vickrey auction?
An addition advantage of sniping programs is bid groups (which I am currently using on a couple auctions).
Basically you include many auctions for the same item and enter the max you’re willing to pay. The program snipes for you sequentially until you’ve won the preset number of items. Then it cancels your remaining snipes.
Sure you could do this manually with Max Bids, but you’d spend an awful lot of time checking, checking, checking.
When I first heard about sniping on eBay it didn’t even have a name. I came up with an alternate way for eBay to run the bidding that, personally, I think would be a lot fairer to all parties.
What I would like to see is, instead of a hard-and-fast closing time, that there would be a “grace period” of, let’s say fifteen minutes. So let’s say an auction is scheduled to end at 10:00. When 10:00 arrives, the 15 minute clock starts. If no new bids are entered during that 15 minutes, then the auction closes for real at 10:15. However, if a new bid is entered, say at 10:10, the 15 minute clock resets so that now the “real” closing time is 10:25. Each time there is a new bid, the 15 minute clock resets. In other words, the auction will only close for real when 15 minutes have gone by with no bids.
Why do I think this is more fair? Because I am more like Jayrot’s GF than I am like those who advocate sniping. And I think a lot of people are. $50 is approximately my maximum for this item. But when it comes right down to it, maybe I am willing to pay $51 or $52 or even $60. I’d like to have the option to consider that for a few minutes, if I find that someone else is willing to pay $50.
Now can someone tell me why my idea is bad? Who would lose if eBay did it that way? The snipers would lose because they wouldn’t be able to win the auction soley because of the time limit. As Princhester said, there is no obligation for bidders to provide market information, but on the other side of that coin, is eBay obligated to structure the auctions such that you can essentially withhold that information?
Who would win if eBay took my suggestion? I believe the sellers would win because the auction would now go to the person who really was willing to pay the most. You can call me “foolish” or “sub-optimal” or whatever else you want, but if I want to see if anyone goes above my initial max of $50 and then decide in a few minutes if I want to go higher, why shouldn’t I be able to? If you, on the other hand, have a hard-and-fast $50 limit, and you put that in at the last second, and then the 15 minute clock kicks in and I bid $51, you have the satisfaction of knowing that you stuck to your limit.
I mean think about it, isn’t that the way a real auction works? You bid $50 and then the auctioneer does the “going once, going twice…” thing. If during that I bid $51, the auctioneer resets to “going once, going twice…”, giving you a bit of time to think about whether that $50 was your “real” maximum or not.
I snipe every auction I’ve ever bid on, and I definitely believe it’s saved me money. Doing anything else just doesn’t make any sense to me. The only time it’s backfired is when I was watching an auction set to close at six in the morning (this was before there was software to snipe for you, or at least before I knew about it), so I set my alarm for 5:45 so I’d have plenty of time to log in before placing a bid. Then my boyfriend came to bed and reset the alarm for nine (without telling me). Believe me, he got an earful the next day.
As for the “grace period” idea, I think it would actually hurt the sellers. Part of the reason Ebay is so popular is because it’s a kind of competition. The time limit makes things more exciting. Besides, if you’re going to be online for the last few minutes of a bid (which you would be, if you were watching during the grace period), why not just snipe it? There’s usually a delay of at least a few seconds between the last snipe bid and the close; I usually bid two minutes before the end to compensate for computer slowness. I know I’d probably use Ebay a lot less if the option to snipe was removed (and I don’t use it that much now), and there’s probably a lot of others that would do the same. Thereby hurting sellers. Also, the software that would have to be used to do something like that is going to cost something, and if that cost is passed onto sellers (which it would be) then it’s definitely hurting them.
This is exactly how the amazon system works.
It seems like the snipers are all folks who take eBay very seriously. Gotta get it. Gotta get the best deal. It doesn’t matter if I have to be up at 3:00 in the morning, miss my son’s play at school, leave work early, stay late bidding at the office, or keep pages of notes showing exactly when I have to be home to log in to eBay. Gotta have the thrill of the successful snipe.
The non-snipers have a life. They take a look at what they might be interested in, pop in a price, and go out to dinner or play a game with the kids.
There have been a few expensive items I’ve sniped on. For the most part, though, I see something interesting and make a bid. If I get it, cool. If I don’t, I’ll find something else. I tend to bid low, and I tend to lose the vast majority of items I bid on. What I get, I’m happy with. I’m kind of the same at live auctions. The auctioneer starts high. Nobody bids. He drops the starting price. I place an opening bid. If someone else bids, I may come back again, but I rarely bid a third time on one item.
Hmm. The only things I’ve bought from eBay are things that people just don’t want that bad, and that is why they’re selling them! 
Nope. If they’re serious, they use an automated bidding service. It’s such an effective method, it’s really stupid not to do it. It’s much easier than lowballing and nibbling. You make one entry and you’re done.
Actually, it’s the NON-snipers that have no life. They enter a bid early in the game, then continually re-visit the site to pick at it over and over throughout the course of the auction. Sometimes I’ll see 10-20 bids from the same person. They just sit there checking and bidding, checking and bidding… The sniper bids once, and is done with it.
But hey, the fewer people who realize that sniping is best, the better. It just means better deals on the things I buy, and higher prices for the things I sell.
I only use ebay for things that cannot be bought, even often cannot be bought through traditional classifieds services - mainly, vintage synthesizers and musical instruments. There’s definitely no “max bid” in my mind - it’s completely malleable based on circumstances. A particular piece might come up that I’m willing to sell a kidney for, because chances are it’ll be a year or more before I see one show up for sale again. But likewise, a more common piece may show up at such a good deal that I’m willing to pick it up for the price that it seems to be going for.
If Ebay were really to work as a “you big what you’re willing to pay” system, they should be silent auctions. Everyone gets one bid; you bid what you’re willing to pay, and nobody knows how much anyone else bids. When the auction ends, whoever bid the most pays what they bid.