Snipping does give other people less time to up
your price. If you put in a maximum bid of $50
two hours before the auction ends, you might have
to pay $47. Two minutes, $17.
This is the absolute worst example of overbidding I’ve heard of…
An acquaintance who edits a small magazine posted one of the magazine’s back issues on eBay…not really a special or important issue, or anything. By the time the auction ended, the issue sold for $45. The kicker is, as proprietor of the magazine, my acquaintance would have mailed a copy of the exact same back issue to anyone who asked for a standard fee of $4, including postage.
Shipping and Handling charges can often kick an item’s price up to or above what you can get it for elsewhere.
I mostly buy magic supplies and videos on eBay. Sometimes you’ll see a $25 video going for $20, which seems like a good price except that S&H is $6.95, and many online magic retailers have free shipping.
I think they should have a rule limiting S&H to the actual cost of packaging and shipping the item.
Dr. J
Doctor_J, I agree. I won’t do business with sellers who are making a profit off S & H. When I sell, I actually discount shipping a little bit (Say, charge $3 instead of the $3.20 priority shipping). It’s no skin off MY nose to spend 20 cents, particularly since I tend to sell used items where what I get for the item is “pure profit.” It also seems to be a nice goodwill gambit.
Bidding the max bid, and sitting back to wait, doesn’t work against snipers. They will up the bid by the tiniest increment possible, rebidding and rebidding in those final moments, until they hit the bid that beats yours. Like someone else said, I may put in $15.00 as my max bid but I would probably be willing to pay $15.50. Instead, that’s what the sniper gets it for, because I wasn’t watching the auction. If I had put in $15.50, I still wouldn’t have beat the sniper, who was herself probably willing to go to $16.00 and would simply get it for that. Ad nauseum.
You guys know that there are some people on ebay.com who bid on their own stuff with another account, right?
Not all sale prices are real & not all are bought at that price, people might bid & then win & not collect. They just write you & say: sorry I already have that & I don’t want it.
One of the contributing factors is that not all cases of what appear to be “sniping” are that.
The default mode for searching on eBay is “items ending first,” which means that if I’m looking at a seven page list of Games Workshop’s “Warhammer” products, there’s a pretty good chance many of them are going to be ending in just a few minutes.
If one of those happens to be the one I want, and it’s within my price range, sure I’m going to bid on it, even though it looks like was deliberately sniping the guy!
Of course, we’re way more competent than that, and know how to use the filters properly, but surely there are 100 of “them” for every one of us smart folks.
Pete
Long time RGMWer and ardent AOLer
Regarding DoctorJ’s comment, I have certainly encountered people charging outrageous prices for shipping and handling, but I’m not sure how one figures this out anyway. For example, in the scenario listed above where I sold an old computer on eBay, I had no idea what the thing would actually cost to package up, send, and insure. So I looked at what other people were charging for S/H on their systems(which ranged from $35-$45) and picked $40 as my price. I could have theoretically been making a profit, but as I said, the guy who won the bid lived in my city and picked it up, so it ended up being a wash. Still, I think you will find people overestimate the price not because they are deliberately trying to make a profit, but because they aren’t sure and would rather over than under charge. Besides, there is a hassle factor to consider…get a box, find packing materials, get insurance, stand in line at the !#&#*! post office during your lunch hour. I value my time to some extent, and if I waste $5.00 in shipping supplies and my whole lunch hour sending the thing off, I expect to be compensated for that as well.
Regarding Handy’s comment about the fake bids, I have often suspected that is the case, but never seen any proof. Also, what is the deal with assholes setting a ridiculous reserve price on certain items? My wife bids on perfume bottles and has a thing for the ones from the Czech republic, yet there is one prick on there who ALWAYS seems to have a reserve price set way too high. Then my wife ‘wins’ the auction at say $30 (though the ‘reserve price is not met’) and the asshole ALWAYS tries to bargain with her and get her to pay more “how about you pay me $40?”. This is the guy’s whole strategy.
I guess my question is, let’s say I want to find out how much my hypothetical newly restored 1957 Chevy is worth, but I don’t really want to sell it. Can I go on line, start an auction, and set the reserve price at $1,000,000 but the starting bid at $1.00? So, let’s say bidding gets up to $15,000. Can I now be an asshole and walk away telling the winner they didn’t meet my reserve? Can I do this hundreds of times to, say, value items at my hypothetical antique store, and try to weasal ‘just a little more money’ out of the winning bidder like the Czech bottle guy does without any penalty from eBay?
If so, then eBay becomes a great way for people to test the market for products to see what kind of prices people are willing to pay for things. I can’t think of a cheaper way to do market research…
Sure, like that 14 year old boy who put his soul for sale on ebay & got $5 for it. He sent them a letter saying they own it. True.
Like Bart sold his soul to Milhouse for $5. “Pleasure doing business with you, chummmmmmmmmmm…p.”
There’s an article from ZDNet news that I saw today: How to Snipe on eBay
I’ve bought two or three items on eBay, and there are a couple of things here that I just don’t get:
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Why is sniping considered rude by some? This is an auction, with clearly published rules. The person who bids the highest wins. How could anyone get upset about this?
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I still don’t see the point in sniping. Proxy bidding seems like the perfect solution. If I would pay $16.00 for an item, I make that my high bid and I’m not upset if someone gets it for $17, because $16 was as high as I was willing to go. If I get it for $15.50, I’m happy.
I can understand why some people wait until the last minute, because they want to play several competing items in parallel, so they can’t place actual bids on several and have to wait until “post” time on each one. The price of this is that it’s a pain in the butt.
I’m pretty surprised that some people don’t think proxy bidding is the perfect way to go. Can someone clue me in?
Basically, Curt, I agree with you. I have dabbled in bidding on eBay, and only actually won one auction. I was sniped at the last minute on a couple of others. I’ve never bid by any fashion other than proxy bidding well before the deadline. When I got outbid, via sniping or otherwise, it was because somebody was willing to go higher than my maximum bid. Sure, it sucks to lose at the last minute, but do I really have anything to complain about? I don’t think so.
My guess in answer to your question (1) above is that it is kind of annoying to lose, minutes before closing, an auction that you thought you’d won. It’s fine to be disappointed - you wanted the item, got your hopes up, but didn’t get it - but I don’t think it follows that you’ve been wronged in some fashion.
On point (2), I agree with you completely. The discontent, I think, comes when you enter a proxy of $16.00 and wind up losing to a 16.01 bid. "Gee, I would have been willing to go up by **a friggin' penny**", you think to yourself. "If I'd been sniping like all of these other #@%@, I could have had this."
This is how $5.00 items wind up selling for $8.76. A penny seems so inconsequential. The way to avoid getting screwed in an auction is to have a max, and stick to it. You’d pay $16.01? Then bid it. How about $16.20? A little steep? Then don’t bid it. Find a maximum, and stick to it.
The conventional wisdom seems to be that proxy bidding early on drives up the final price. I do not find this at all obvious, and have never seen anybody actually back up this assertion. Sure, if nobody proxies, and nobody even bids until the last 2 minutes in a sniping frenzy, there’s only so much time for bids to rise. But a single proxy bid (at a competitive price) eliminates that. Sure, I could be wrong, but I’d want to see some kind of compelling evidence - I don’t think it’s a no-brainer.
I for one found that putting in a max bid is only a good way to OVERPAY.
When I bid on an auction I will put in a bid. If then someone out bids me I raise it and raise it just because I am mad at that guy who outbid me. Therefore they guy who outbid me will have to pay more if I raise the bid. Even though I have no intention of paying that.
I know what you’re thinking. How is he paying more if I raise him. I raise minimum bids just until my bid wins again. Then boom like lightening that person I out bid will put in another max bid. This way the idiot paid more than he should have.
eBay should put in a rule if during the last 5 minutes of an auction a new bid comes in the auction is extended by an hour. This would prevent that.
Also I found many people if I win things cheap simply refuse to sell them. They know if I leave them negitive feedback they’ll just post it to me and and I don’t want mine to go down when it shouldn’t. So I never post negitive feedback. So if you pay too much people will not push it if you say I am not gonna pay as they know since feedback is only transactual even if they are right you have the power to lower their rating and they don’t want this.
The system is screwed.
I don’t think as a whole people overpay if you look at it globally. I buy CDs a lot and I don’t usually go over $4 as I can always get them at a used CD store for that ($4 + $3 for shipping = $7.00). But I live in Chicago. If you live in a tiny town KMart or Wal-Mart are it for CDs so it’s buy it off eBay for more than it’s worth or get in a car and drive to a big city. Either way it’s the same.
Before I say anything, let me just mention that none of you seem to know what REAL sniping is. Sure, bidding five minutes before the auction ends can be considered sniping, but listen to this story, which also defines some of the reasons for sniping stated by other posters:
I wanted an item that was currently priced at somewhere around 13 dollars. I wanted until there were three seconds left, and put in a bid for 17.03. The second place guy’s bid: 17.00.
Thanks to the wonder of the internet, I can take comfort in the fact that somewhere in this great land of ours, a man was cursing my name. Anyway, I hadn’t exactly PLANNED on waiting until there were three seconds left, but it was pretty funny.
Anyway: You can get an item for cheaper if you only put in one bid as opposed to pointlessly putting in 15 bids over a week, only to be outbid each time. The lack of activity can also lull others into a false sense of security. I realize that these have already been stated, but I wanted to tell my little story to anyone who’ll listen.
Someone once bid on an item of mine, $10.11 I asked in the ebay newsgroup about what sort of bid was that? They told me that 11 cents gives the right margin. Clever.
I still claim that this is not true if the max bid you put in really is your max bid. If somebody beats my (true) max bid, they’ve beaten me. I’m out of the auction.
If he’s doing this, then he’s being an idiot and deserves to overpay. If that max bid he put in really was as high as he was willing to go, then congratulations, you just won the item. For, it sounds like, more than you think it was worth. Who’s screwing whom here? 
People seem to have this idea that manually bidding in increments will result in a lower winning bid than just setting a nice, high maximum and sitting back. I don’t see how this is the case, and the “testimonials” I’ve seen in this discussion have been far from convincing.
That’s all fine and good, and the ground your standing on is fairly solid, but one thing needs to be said.
If you bid your maximum early, and rely upon proxy to find the fair market price in an ebay auction, you will never win an auction. Ever.
Consider two identical items for sale, ending at the exact same time. Both you and I want to spend no more than $20 on them. You put your proxy bid of $20 in on item 1 7 days before the end of the auction. I don’t do a damn thing on item 2.
What is going to happen?
Well, someone is going to bump your bid up a nickel at a time to find out the upper limit on the item. He will then wait until the last moment to snipe (“poopnut” in my circle of friends) on item 2.
If you don’t believe me, this is what I do. I’ve done it roughly 10 times. Item 1 will always be outbid. Item 2 will remain at a low price for the taking.
Your experience is certainly worth more than my philosophizing, so I’m happy to concede what you’re saying. It makes sense to me.
But, isn’t it somewhat dependent on there being more than one (identical) items up for sale, more or less simultaneously? Simultaneous auctions, of which I’d like to win any one, make things really complicated - for those situations, I can see why sniping is the only real option.
It’s possible that this difference in philosophy comes simply from this. The stuff I bid on is generally not sharing the stage with another item ending more or less at the same time. They can be treated separately, although if there’s a 2nd auction for a similar item I’ll certainly wait until Auction A is over before bidding at all on Auction B.
If it works for you, keep at it. When I’ve won more than 1 eBay auction I may have more than theoretical musings to stand on.
Connor wrote:
All general statements are false.
[quote]
What is going to happen?
Well, someone is going to bump your bid up a nickel at a time to find out the upper limit on the item. He will then wait until the last moment to snipe (“poopnut” in my circle of friends) on item 2.
[quote]
I don’t understand the logic of this. If he ups the bid a nickel at a time, I guess he stops when he is not immediately overbid, which would be 5 cents over the other guy’s max. But then he’s out there with an offer to buy, at a price higher than item 2 is listed for. If there’s anyone else who wants that widget, wouldn’t they just then bid on item 2 at a lower price? It sounds like if you and several others are doing this, you’re driving up the price of item 1 to something that’s unrelated to its value (but is only constrained by how many times people are doing this at 5-cent increments), and one of you will get stuck with item 1 at an inflated price. I’m in general pretty comfortable with, and pretty good at, negotiating. You and your friends sound like people I’d like to deal with. Do you need a good used car or boat? I have two of them…
And sirdiesel wrote:
If that had been me whose $17 bid lost, I wouldn’t be cursing you. I’d either be saying “Well, $17 was as high as I was willing to go, and someone else got it”, or “Damn, I would have gone higher than $17, so I was stupid to put in a max of $17. Next time I’ll proxy-bid what I’m really willing to spend.”
My example of the two items is a very concise explanation. You can remove the two items to two different time frames, if you like. The point remains the same.
Other times what I will do is look up someone’s bid history. I’ll find out what their proxy is on previous like items, and I’ll snipe them for pennies more than they were willing to go.
And if you up a bid by a nickel seven days before the end of an auction, odds are VERY good (sorry, don’t want to make any absolute statements that you’ll immediately dismiss, Curt) that it will be outbid. Its not something I would normally do with two identical items, but it is something I will typically do to find out what an item’s upper limit is. This completely eliminates the point of the proxy. If I want an item and it has a proxy bid on it, I’m not going to throw my whole stash in on it. I want it for pennies more, without having to worry about other snipers. So I’ll nip at it until its mine. And if I want it badly enough, I’ll watch it like a hawk until the end of the auction.
If you’re proxy bidding on a car, or some other item that’s not likely to get sniped - fine. Otherwise, you’re just asking to pay a premium.