Who here hates on-line sellers sometimes?

[understatement]

I'm willing to bet that it does provide a small advantage in some instances, but none of us have any empirical data to prove or disprove that advantage or how often it occurs. All that we have are our own personal feelings and beliefs about it, and that's it.

Like I said before, it's just too much work and stress for me. I don't want or need anything on eBay so badly that I'm going to halt my life in order to watch an auction just so that I can put a bid in last second. I used to do it all the time. Setting an alarm for 3 am so I wouldn't miss out, interrupting dinner with my wife so I could place a bid, dropping whatever far more important thing that I could be doing in order to try and win an auction for slightly less money just seemed absurd to me. Plus, it RARELY ever worked. Most often I either lost or won at a price right around or at my max bid, which means that I totally wasted my time.

I can understand this as the reasoning for not sniping over just out right denying that it could work even if only every once in a while.

That's partially right. Over time, people have found the names of well known bidders through feedback on old auctions and you can use them in the advanced search on Ebay to track what that bidder is currently bidding on. For anyone that finds gems by exploiting listing mistakes or things that are not fully described in the auction description, it means that they have to wait until the very end to avoid drawing attention to their finds.

That’s some Guerrilla warfare sniping right there and yea that’s way too much of a waste of time IMO. If I happen to stumble across something not listed correctly I might try to snipe it but I not going to scan for people that scan for miss-listed items or look for miss-listed items myself.