Who here hates on-line sellers sometimes?

[jonebone]

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.

You've never seen auctions with an BIN option, that get bid up past the original BIN price?

Example, game with $19.99 starting bid, $29.99 BIN option.

I want it, not sure what I want to pay. I wait until the last 5 seconds to bid, to hide my intent. I can come in with a $29.98 max bid and probably win it 99 times out of 100, for closer to $20 than $30. Why? Because everyone else viewing the auction assumes it is not worth $30, otherwise the BIN would have been clicked already.

Or, I could just bid $29.98 on day one. Anyone else viewing the auction late doesn't even know the BIN existed, and just see my bid showing at $19.99. If they want it, they can push it up as high as they want it to go, well past $30.

Please don't argue with me. You asked for an example, I provided one. End of discussion.

[JSoup]

You've never seen auctions with an BIN option, that get bid up past the original BIN price?

Example, game with $19.99 starting bid, $29.99 BIN option.

I want it, not sure what I want to pay. I wait until the last 5 seconds to bid, to hide my intent. I can come in with a $29.98 max bid and probably win it 99 times out of 100, for closer to $20 than $30. Why? Because everyone else viewing the auction assumes it is not worth $30, otherwise the BIN would have been clicked already.

Or, I could just bid $29.98 on day one. Anyone else viewing the auction late doesn't even know the BIN existed, and just see my bid showing at $19.99. If they want it, they can push it up as high as they want it to go, well past $30.

Please don't argue with me. You asked for an example, I provided one. End of discussion.

Your example is a fine example of imaginary savings.

[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.

[Bojay1997]

How is this relevant in any way to the discussion? Nobody else bid, so you got it for slightly less than the BIN. All you did is wait to see if anyone else wanted it and it turns out they didn't. So you paid $20 for something that nobody else wanted. Congratulations? It also shows you don't really know how much things are worth if you are waiting for other bidders to help you figure it out. That seems like a dumb way to run a small reselling business.

You've never seen auctions with an BIN option, that get bid up past the original BIN price?

Example, game with $19.99 starting bid, $29.99 BIN option.

I want it, not sure what I want to pay. I wait until the last 5 seconds to bid, to hide my intent. I can come in with a $29.98 max bid and probably win it 99 times out of 100, for closer to $20 than $30. Why? Because everyone else viewing the auction assumes it is not worth $30, otherwise the BIN would have been clicked already.

Or, I could just bid $29.98 on day one. Anyone else viewing the auction late doesn't even know the BIN existed, and just see my bid showing at $19.99. If they want it, they can push it up as high as they want it to go, well past $30.

Please don't argue with me. You asked for an example, I provided one. End of discussion.

[jonebone]

How is this relevant in any way to the discussion? Nobody else bid, so you got it for slightly less than the BIN. All you did is wait to see if anyone else wanted it and it turns out they didn't. So you paid $20 for something that nobody else wanted. Congratulations? It also shows you don't really know how much things are worth if you are waiting for other bidders to help you figure it out. That seems like a dumb way to run a small reselling business.

The example was purely hypothetical, but thanks for taking offense. For someone so "knowledgeable", you sure seem to argue with absolutely anything you don't understand. Also, I'm just a collector who collects for free, not a reselling business.

[Bojay1997]

I'm not offended at all and I understand how a BIN and starting bid works. Your hypothetical just has nothing to do with sniping or proving it works or not. It also isn't the scenario the OP is talking about. All it shows is that if you gamble on a BIN by waiting till the last minute, you can get it for the starting bid. If nobody else is interested, you can accomplish the same thing by bidding immediately at the $20 level. If you wait, you run the risk of losing to somebody who hits the BIN and you have no chance to then snipe or do anything else. If to you the item is not worth the BIN or not something you really care about, I suppose that's a good way to operate. If, however, it is worth the BIN, you are taking a gamble and may very well end up not winning. Similarly, if you wait until the last minute to bid on a regular auction, you risk a side deal or a seller just cancelling the auction. Admittedly, you run those same risks even if you do bid, but I think it's probably less likely once an auction has a bid that such side dealing will occur.

The only two things that sniping accomplishes is possibly deterring shill bidding by the seller on auctions that don't have any other bids but yours and preventing other bidders from tracking your interest in auctions where there is a hidden gem that others haven't noticed. This seems to be a bigger problem lately as at least on Sealed Game Heaven, people are posting buyer's Ebay IDs and forcing buyers to wait until the last minute to bid so that others won't discover their hidden gems.

You can call it whatever you want, but you're running a small business which you then take the profits from to buy games for your personal collection. Justify it however you want, but that's how most small businesses run. The owners take the profits and buy what they want with them.

The example was purely hypothetical, but thanks for taking offense. For someone so "knowledgeable", you sure seem to argue with absolutely anything you don't understand. Also, I'm just a collector who collects for free, not a reselling business.

[understatement]

This seems to be a bigger problem lately as at least on Sealed Game Heaven, people are posting buyer's Ebay IDs and forcing buyers to wait until the last minute to bid so that others won't discover their hidden gems.

How is that happening? Like they'll take your ID after you leave feedback and tell others on the site to black list you or something?

[wiggyx]

[B]The psychology of course is that no one really knows what they're willing to pay and the intense moments at the end you end up putting in a little more, or a lot more like in that scene in War Horse.

I feel that there is a lot of truth to this.

I know what I'm willing to pay, that's for sure. But there are most definitely going to be people who get caught up in the moment and end up bidding well beyond what they had initially thought their max would be. It's happened to me in the past, and I imagine to many of us. That's just one more reason that I don't let myself get sucked into the last second bidding wars.

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.

That's what some of us are driving at; You CANNOT gather the sort of data that you're referring to. It's just not available to you, the seller, or other bidders.

No amount of "data points" that you are able to assemble would prove that sniping has given anyone an advantage.

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.

If that's really the auction, PROTOTYPE should be happy he lost if he only wanted it for MK3. That's the PC version of MK3, not the PS1 version.

!

I wouldn't have paid 30 bucks for that lot. Nothing in there is worth much of anything. That's a 10 dollar lot IMO.

How is that happening? Like they'll take your ID after you leave feedback and tell others on the site to black list you or something?

Yeah, this confuses me as well.

Are you saying that they're tracking buyer or seller IDs? You cannot track the former, so I can only hope that you mean the latter. Still, I don't understand how keeping tabs on a seller helps you win an auction or that you're somehow "blocking" someone else. Please elaborate.

[Aussie2B]

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.

There is a middle ground, you know. I generally try to wait as close to the end as possible, but I don't wake up in the dead of night or cancel my plans for anything important. If it's not convenient for me, then I'll bid a few hours before the end or what have you. I still find that preferable to bidding days in advance.

[Bojay1997]

How is that happening? Like they'll take your ID after you leave feedback and tell others on the site to black list you or something?

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.

[wiggyx]

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 150% pure crazy shit right there. Wow.

[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.

[xelement5x]

The problem with this argument is that with the way eBay works, it is impossible to prove that your sniping works.

If you snipe successfully, you avoid driving the price up there will be no evidence that you succeeded in preventing additional incremental bids since your tactic actually worked.

However, you can see when you put in your max price and watch someone chip away at it by using the bid history. I have seen this happen enough times personally that I switched to last minute sniping at my max amount. It's frustrating to see this scenario happen:

"Okay, put in my max bid of $50, but the current high bid is only $15 with an only a bit left. It'll be a great deal if I get this at $15!"
..10 mins later
"Oh the person below increased their bid, now it's up to $25"
..3 mins later
"Now they bid it up to $28"
..1 min later
"Now they bid it up to $31, still a good deal though"
..1 min later
"Now they bid it up to $36"
..1 min later
"Now they bid it up to $41.98, looks like this person really wants this"
...auction ends.
"Well I won the game at below my max price, but it's less of a good deal than it was starting out."

This is not EVERY scenario, just one I've seen play out so many time personally that I hate dealing with it. Now I just let the other person think they're in the lead for as long as they want until the last moment, then put in my max bid amount.

If it's not enough then oh well; if I win at a good price then wahoo! If there's a mix of the two with it being bidded up, c'est la vie; I've still got the item at a price at or below what I was willing to pay. But I will not just throw away the extra money by leaving it to chance and letting it incrementally be bidded up to my max price over a period of time.

[JSoup]

I often mussed, a few years back, about a theoretical biding system that allowed each user to only bid once. Each buyer is, therefore, encouraged to bid what they are willing to bid and what happens from there happens.

So many obvious problems with a model like that.......

[The 1 2 P]

However, you can see when you put in your max price and watch someone chip away at it by using the bid history. I have seen this happen enough times personally that I switched to last minute sniping at my max amount. It's frustrating to see this scenario happen:

"Okay, put in my max bid of $50, but the current high bid is only $15 with an only a bit left. It'll be a great deal if I get this at $15!"
..10 mins later
"Oh the person below increased their bid, now it's up to $25"
..3 mins later
"Now they bid it up to $28"
..1 min later
"Now they bid it up to $31, still a good deal though"
..1 min later
"Now they bid it up to $36"
..1 min later
"Now they bid it up to $41.98, looks like this person really wants this"
...auction ends.
"Well I won the game at below my max price, but it's less of a good deal than it was starting out."

This is not EVERY scenario, just one I've seen play out so many time personally that I hate dealing with it. Now I just let the other person think they're in the lead for as long as they want until the last moment, then put in my max bid amount.

You just described exactly why I only snipe on ebay. During the first few years I had an account that scenario you listed happened atleast 50-70% of the time I bid on something. Me and Lockshawl(who got out of collecting a few years ago) use to always bid demo disc up much higher than they would have went for had one of us waited until the last few seconds. But eventually thats what I did. He kept bidding as soon as he saw something he wanted and I waited until the last 10 seconds and won every single time.

Today it's the samething for atleast half the stuff I want. Theres always atleast two dudes in an endless bidding war that I never take part in. I wait until the last few seconds and swoop in. Sometimes I win, sometimes I don't. And while I do understand what others were saying earlier about who ever bids the highest will win regardless of when they bid, the fact still remains that in atleast half the items I bid on I end up winning them for much less because I choose to wait until the last second to bid instead of getting into a bidding war with someone who thinks they are going to get a special prize for being the highest bidder the longest.