Who here hates on-line sellers sometimes?

[Cornelius]

I've been using ebay since day one and I still don't understand the need for all this crap. If I see something I want on ebay, I set my max bid for whatever I feel it's worth and leave it at that. If someone else wins, they obviously placed more value on it than I did.

Exactly. That's what most bidders do which is why sniping doesn't work plain and simple. It's also why people who complain about losing an auction that goes to completion and don't end up as the highest bidder have literally nothing to complain about.

I'm with Understatement and Aussie on this one, and this quote is the part of your argument that I disagree with. Many bidders get emotionally invested in 'winning' an auction they've already bid on. As a direct refutation that 'most bidders set their max and leave it', just look at all the times a bidder puts in ten bids raising it 50 cents each time until they claim the lead (or not). This is not the behavior of someone setting their max. Additionally, if you look at completed auctions like I do when trying to price something, it isn't all that uncommon to find auctions that ended higher than BINs for the same item. This is more evidence that people get emotionally invested in winning. This is what the term 'bidding war' defines. Heck, the existence and common usage of the term bidding war defies the 'most bidders set their max' claim.

I personally use a sniping website to take out any emotion on my part and because I believe it can help get a better price. It is real easy for me to say 'maybe just one more dollar' if I bid early on and get outbid. What can I say, I'm weak-willed compared to Bojay and GameboyColor. So instead I just punch it in goofbay and forget about it.

The only way to prove that you can get lower prices using sniping would be to get lots of data points and run some statistical analysis. That actually wouldn't be too hard on an item with a pretty steady price/value over time, it would just take a long time to mine out the data. I feel the evidence I mentioned above is pretty compelling, though.

[JSoup]

For the record, I wasn't claiming that 'make a bid and leave it' was what the majority (or, hell, even the minority) do. Just what I do.