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. You have also just proven that what you believe is the same fallacy myself and the others saying sniping doesn't work have been talking about. The OP has zero idea how much the sniper bid. What if the sniper actually increased his bid by an increment of $50? The way Ebay works, everyone's maximum bid is kept secret. Not even the seller knows how much the bidder really bid. All anyone ever knows is who bid the most by the minimum increment needed to beat the next highest bid. If the OP had bid again, there is no guarantee he would have won or beaten the sniper's bid. In fact, it's more likely that he wouldn't have beaten the winning bidder, especially if he was just going to bid $1 more. In the end, it was his unwillingness to bid his maximum that cost him the item, not when he placed his bid.