Quote Originally Posted by Bojay1997 View Post
Ok, provide me one bit of evidence, not speculation, that your sniping has ever resulted in you paying less for an item than if you had bid the maximum amount you were willing to pay on day one. The point is, unless you personally know the other bidders and they told you "gee, I was really planning on bidding again, but you made your last bid too soon before the auction ended and I couldn't", there is no way you can ever know if your sniping has ever saved you a dime or if every auction you have ever bid on ended exactly where it would have if you just bid the maximum on day one.
There's no way to show evidence that you've saved money, but it's pretty clear when you've lost money or the auction and could've avoided that. When you have over a decade of experience placing your own bid that outbids the previous top bidder and then seeing him/her incrementally try to outbid you in the final seconds, it's obvious that there are many people who don't understand how eBay works and bid only to claim the top bid, not to their max. Sure, you could theorize that some of these people would do this even without any competition appearing, just to try to protect their top bid status by putting in an even higher maximum, but I'm highly skeptical that that scenario accounts for more than a small fraction of these situations.