That last sentence is key. Sure, we all want to win within our budget. But winning for less than that is even better. A maximum bid is merely an upper bound. My goal, and that of most people, is to do better than that.
I skimped on my description of the situation and you filled in blanks that didn’t really apply. E.g., there was a buy-it-now price on all three. The first two idjits both bid over the buy-it-now price. They could have easily bought either of the other two right then for less! I was merely watching the first auction and was going to bid late if nothing happened. If I had bid my maximum before that (when there was no bids) I would have ended up paying quite a lot more than I did. Waiting till near the end to bid (or not) saved me money. That counts.
I have no idea how to aim at the auction no was is looking at. The number of watchers is far from an exact way to determine this. Having a looking counter cannot be relied upon.
What’s the evil part? The part where you mistakenly guessed that the item would go for $60? It’s evil because you don’t understand the nature if a blind timed auction?
There’s nothing evil about waiting for the last moment to bid.
There are very good reasons to withhold your bid until the end.
As mentioned above, there are multiple auctions. You know your max price, but you can’t bid that on all of them because you want to buy only one. One method is to bid only on the auction ending soonest. Another is to simply bid just before the auction closing time.
Especially for collectibles, the value of something is closely tied to how much people are willing to pay for it. If you bid an item up early in an auction, you’re signaling to other potential buyers that the item has value, and they then decide they’re willing to pay more. (As mentioned above.)
Regardless of whether it’s rational or not, if you bid it tends to drive up the price. (It’s clearly rational for collectibles, and somewhat true for utilitarian items.) So, the rational thing to do is withhold your bid, to avoid driving up the price.
I’ve I’ve been outbid on EVERY auction where I simply bid my max when I found the listing. I changed my ways and concluded a number of auctions by posting the same amount just before the auction end. That might be happenstance, of course.
But aceplace still has a good idea. It seems to me quite reasonable for Ebay to offer more than one kind of auction. (They already do, in fact; with BuyItNow and a few other options.) The standard ebay auction is what I believe is called a blind auction with reserve, though it’s a bit of a variation on that because it’s not totally blind: you always see the second highest bid. I think it would be perfectly reasonable for them to offer other types, such as one where bidding stops after set time but only X minutes after the last bid (say, 5 or 10 minutes).
I wonder how many sellers would choose this, and whether buyers would love or hate it, and whether it’d generate higher prices or not. I’m willing to bet that Ebay & co have considered it.
I also wonder how bidding bots would behave for these auctions, and whether they’d make much of a difference.
I’ve never used a bot or auction assistant or whatever. I just enter my bid about a half a minute before the auction end. But frankly, I use auctions to find the prices and then pick a Buy-It-Now that’s in the range. I’m buying stuff for my use, not for resale, and not enough where the bit extra I pay amounts to much over the long haul. It’s nearly always less than several of the auctions!
I wasn’t even aware that it was possible to bid above a Buy It Now price?
But if so, how could someone else doing that cost you more, regardless of when your bid went in? You weren’t bidding above BIN, right? So that was always a ceiling on your cost.
It is, since once someone had bid, BIN goes away, iirc. So, what you do is bid under the BIN price,but then more bids come in, resulting in a higher ending price that if the first person had just BIN. I think.
It induces you to make your bid the highest amount that you actually are willing to pay. Don’t think of it as an outcry auction, think of it as a sealed-bid auction. Bid the highest amount you are willing to pay and you’ll wind up paying one bid-increment higher than the 2nd highest bid.
If everybody only bid once at their maximum amount, then sniping would become useless. So bid only once and stop griping. Sniper-gripers, like the OP, bid hoping to get a bargain. Snipers bid to win.
I use a sniping service to place my bid. I don’t get caught in the end-of-auction frenzy; I don’t need to remember when the auction ends; I can cancel my bid if I find an alternate before the auction ends.
Question for those who use a sniping service: do they have access to your eBay account in such a way that they could get to your payment information? I think that idea alone would scare me off that they could.
IIRC (it’s been a while), they have access to your account for placing bids on your behalf, but your payment stuff is separate- they don’t pay for you or anything like that.
I always had to log in and work out the paypal stuff with the seller directly after I’d won the auction.
It’s been a while since I did anything on eBay, but I recall it was necessary to set up a ‘token’ so that the snipe utility could place bids, but that’s all it could do - a bit like when you allow a mobile app to post things to your Facebook wall.
Thanks, guys. If I’d have thought about it a bit more, I’d have realized that eBay and PayPal are separate. Since I always use them from my phone, I forgot.
I’ve watched two bidders bid each other up a dollar at a time over a few days, only to have a sniper take it at the end. As a seller, I’m lukewarm on snipers, although it is nice to get a huge jump at the end of an auction. As a buyer I love sniping. I figure out what I want to pay, set the sniping program and forget about it. No worries that I’ll bid more than I should due to being caught up in a bidding frenzy.
My husband has a near phobic desire to have all of his tool purchases for his clock repairs (and other sorts of tools, including very large vises) originate in the US or Germany. Switzerland is also acceptable. Preferably made prior to WW2. He spends a great dealing of time sifting through listings and belongs to the “bid your max and leave it school”. He just got a leather case of very long drill bits for $25. That’s typical. (They are scary sharp, too, though a bit rusty, and the cas needs rejuvenation). He’s not sweaty, and he wouldn’t snipe the bathtub toy, but if there is something he thinks is particularly desirable he won’t put his max bid in until the very end.
Sometimes the seller is angry about the low price…but that’s another subject.
Not everyone has access to a smart phone or use of a computer at any time of day, so sniping is convenient and I’d guess increases the final price on a lot of auctions because they aren’t limited to just buyers that are online at the time of the auction’s closing. Before I had use of a snipe program, I’d miss out on bidding on a lot of auctions because I happened to be away at the time of closing, and often the closing price turned out to be a steal.
We have an auctioneer in Australia whose online Gumtree site extends the bidding time at the end, this then leads to ten page threads on how they should be like eBay and stop ripping people off.
A traditional auction provides no warranty, all goods are “as is”, this was eBay’s thinking calling it an auction, to deal with potential warranty claims.