Don’t beat em, join em. If you put bids on items on ebay, the very act of doing so gives information to other bidders. Sometimes stuff on ebay is undervalued or other bidders lowball an item with a maximum bid below the maximum they are actually willing to pay.
Say there’s an item that is worth $100 to you. It’s worth $90 to another bidder. You are the only 2 bidders at this auction who matter.
The current price of the item is currently $20. The bidder who it’s worth $90 to enters a maximum bid of only $50. He’s made a mistake.
You have 2 choices :
You can put your $100 maximum bid in now. This will immediately push the displayed price of the item to $51. The other bidder who is willing to pay $90 may in fact change his maximum bid to $90 and now the item will cost you $91 when sold.
You can use a third party ebay sniping tool like thisone. In the last 3 seconds of the auction, this computer program will send a bid to ebay with your maximum bid of $100. You don’t even bid on the auction until the last 3 seconds. This also has the very useful trait that you can change your mind about bidding at all at any time until the last few seconds of the auction. (and you won’t get in trouble with ebay for retracting a bid)
In this hypothetical example, you’ll outbid the person who has a bid of $50 registered but is willing to pay $90 with a “snipe” that gets you the item for $51.
Like I said, the only way sniping works is if the other bidders don’t really put in their maximum amount. Honestly, I think it’s silly not to. I understand sitting on an auction until the last day in order to avoid bidding wars/attention or the hope that other watchers have moved on to other auctions, but sniping merely depends on someone else not really understanding eBay. I’m more annoyed at the people that give snipers their opportunity than the snipers themselves.
Emotion can also get involved. That hypothetical example I gave? Maybe that guy who it’s worth $90 changes his mind when he sees the current price at $91 and ups his bid. The act of bidding itself affects what other people do. When you snipe, you prevent other bidders from knowing you are even interested until it’s too late for them to react.
I go to “real” auctions every other week and I have never seen an auctioneer on a regular basis waste a full minute waiting on a final bid. Maybe on a car or a house auction. Or at a high end art auction, but most auctions are fast and furious, once the auctioneer calls sold its to bad, you should have been involved in the bidding. Still I often wait until the end to bid and generally get what I came for, but about 20% of the time I miss out due to hesitation on my part and then get worked up over the one that got away about 5% of the time.
Sniping on eBay is a great way to get a deal too, but it has to happen in the last 15 seconds to be effective. Start 2 minutes early and you get into a bidding war with other snippers.
Not bidding your maximum is perfectly logical in many circumstances. I’ve done it and it’s worked out well.
E.g., the main thing for most people is that there multiple instances of the same item available spread out over time. But keeping your bid low when you first start out, you might scoop up something for cheap. Only resort to setting a higher max. if none of those work out.
I’ve seen really odd behavior: The same item by the same seller being sold on 3 consecutive days. The first one had a bidding war by 2 others, the 2nd I got for the minimum bid, the third no one bid at all. If I had bid my maximum on the first one I would have paid 3 times as much at least.
There is no point in trying to be fully logical in bidding on eBay. You are not bidding against other logical people. You are bidding against idiots in most cases. Taking advantage of their stupidity requires some non-obvious moves.
Over the years I’ve bought a few things from eBay. The only bids I’ve ever place have been in the final seconds, usually with a third party sniping program.
Since you saw that there were three auctions and one was being totally ignored, why would you even bother bidding on the first one that people were bidding on? In a case like that bidding your maximum or not has not changed in this situation. The logical choice at hand is to simply aim for the auction nobody is looking at. And that’s why I espouse waiting until the last day of your chosen auction, so you can see what is happening with other auctions and you can switch your attentions if desired. A maximum bid is still the best course of action if you want to win within your budget.
And yes, there’s lots of stupid people on eBay. I’m annoyed at them for being so stupid so that these sorts of bidding games follow, and I do take advantage of that stupidity every now and then, but frankly I often don’t have time to play the game. I generally just put my maximum bid in an hour to 15 minutes before close and call it a day. Nothing I bid on is really so important as to warrant sniping or strategies or whatever.
Habeed, that’s the best description of why sniping works that I’ve ever seen. Good job. And truly, I kind of see it as tipping your hand in poker. Why give away too much information to sink you right off the bat?
You could use an automated tool. Just google for one. An automated tool can snipe inhumanely close to the deadline (3 seconds, and do it reliably even) and you don’t have to wake up.
Ah ha! I suspected those things existed, but no one has mentioned them before so I wasn’t sure. I don’t do a lot of buying on eBay, so I’m not super familiar with all the ins and outs, but the few times I’ve been sniped, they only won the item by one bid increment, and still way far away from the maximum bid I had placed.
The last time really hurt. I don’t usually have time to sit hunched over my computer clicking refresh, but this was an item I really, really wanted, so I wanted to feel the thrill of the win. My bid was $4.99, my max bid was $50. No one else had placed a bid, so I didn’t increase my max bid right before the end like you all will probably say I should have. Since the item was an old bathtub toy, and no one else had expressed any interest, I didn’t figure on some sweaty old guy hunched over his computer waiting until the last ten seconds to place a bid. (That’s how I imagine the sniper who snatched victory from my hands after a ten-year search for this toy. And it’s never been relisted.) So it’s not like the seller got that much more money…I believe the final price was $6.49. I wouldn’t have minded a bidding war as much as I minded being sniped that close to the end. Two minutes I could have dealt with. Under ten seconds it was impossible to rebid. Knowing that it was some damn program possibly makes me even angrier, to be honest.
I’m a little surprised nobody has mentioned this yet:
An eBay auction is a silent auction where they tell you in advance what time the auction ends.
Personally, I like the OnSale method, or at least a variation on it - if there are any bids in the final minute, the auction now ends one minute after the most recent bid is made. Doesn’t eBay have a way of automatically extending an auction in a case like this if the seller pays a fee?
You’re right, where other people are underbidding for various reasons, not-sniping my one bid might mean that I miss the possibility of “saving” money.
But, look, these scenarios postulate that the item is “worth $100” to me. By my interpretation that means that I would have paid $100 on the spot, had I seen it listed as a straight retail sale.
I don’t mind keeping more of my money, but there’s never anything on eBay that I need, and rarely anything that I won’t have multiple other opportunities for. It’s not worth any extra effort on my part to play games to snag this one, now, at a “savings.”
Perhaps this is why I haven’t bought anything through eBay for several years (I have sold some). When I was last buying, I wasn’t aware of sniping tools, so I would have had to do it manually.
Yeah, that doesn’t make sense. Ebay should have automatically upped both of your bids until the person with the highest max bid was on top, and only by the minimum bid increment.
So if you bid $4.99, and had a max bid of $50, and the other guy had a max bid of $20, and the auction’s minimum bid increment is $1.50, you should have won the auction at something like $21.50.
Because the eBay program is set up to do multiple bids in increments based upon how much you said your top bid was. If you said $100 was your top bid and was at $12.50 when you had 2 minutes left you would see bids of $15, $20, $25 and so on until you became the high bidder again. With three seconds left the program doesn’t have time to react.
Sniping is great if you’re looking for something, and you see it seriously undervalued without too much time remaining on the auction. For example, I got a new DeWalt DCD710 for $48 via sniping an Ebay auction, while it normally goes for $139 new at Home Depot, and I also got an Echo 370 chainsaw for $175 new, when they go for $270 new at Home Depot.
