Quote Originally Posted by Aussie2B View Post
Sniping is to deal with the people who don't put in their max bid. There are a lot of bidders who will incrementally bid just for the purpose of claiming the top bidder status. When they get outbid, then they just make another bid. If you bid at the very end, you can outsmart them by not giving them enough time to reclaim the top spot. If you bid earlier, they'll either chip away at your lead, forcing you to pay more, or will outbid you. I've never used an automatic bidding program myself, but I often do wait until near the end. There are times when I wish I placed my bid even later since if I leave a minute or two remaining, the bidder I outbid will have enough time to place some more bids.
Quote Originally Posted by understatement View Post
Ebay is a system if you know how to work it only people’s initial bids will determine what you pay.

As an example, say a lot of games goes up starting at $.99 for 7 days and this lots estimated value is $100. I want it but I don’t bid till the last 20 seconds so I watch for now, by day two it has say 4 bids and is currently sitting at $5.50 with someone on the winning side with a max bid of say $25.00 because like the OP he wants to get the lot cheap. He sits with the winning bid all the way till the end, So he assumes that hes going get a great deal when he wins. He might sit there with the mouse on the “1 click bid” button but if no one has pushed past his $25 bid by now why would they? So he keeps his max bid where it is. Then someone like me comes and in the last 20 seconds and puts a max bid of $90. The guy doesn’t know what to do he was so sure it was won he might have enough time to do one or two “1 click bids” but not enough to put in a new max bid. So now I just won a $100 lot for about $29 and if another sniper did it for more than $90 I wouldn’t have time to even try another bid and would lose or if bid up to my max I would pay as I was willing to do from the start.

Edit: Basically what Aussie2B said.

The logic still seems broken to me, and it's largely because you assume you're the only person that's bidding last minute, and that the person whom you are bidding against hasn't entered their max bid from the get-go.

Let's say your max is 90 bucks and you bid in the last 20 seconds, and I do the same but with a $100 max, then I win. It didn't matter one bit that you waited until the last second to bid. And if $90 was your max and there's a bidding war going on, or I had bid my max of $100 on day one, then it wouldn't have mattered anyway. Other people will be bidding last second, and that gives you just about zero advantage.

Sure, if one guy is bidding and hasn't entered the highest price that he's willing to pay, AND doesn't do a very good job of watching the auction at the very end, then you are correct, it will be easy to outbid him last second and win. Assuming that someone bidding against you in the last 30 or so seconds "doesn't know what to do" is just that, assuming. You "know" what you're doing, so you could just as easily assume that he does too.

I've bid on PLENTY of auctions where someone has chipped away until they hit the max bid that I or someone else holds in the last minute or so. Whether they chip away with 30 days left or 30 seconds doesn't matter, there are folks that will do so either way.

The method that you guys prescribe may have an amount of efficacy in certain, rare instances. But it's hardly the norm, at least in my experience with eBay in the last 13 years. All that said, I've employed your variety of tactic in the past. I found it both time and energy consuming, not to mention a waste of both on most occasions.

EVERYONE has a price limit, sniper or not. Racing against the clock doesn't guarantee that yours is the max or that someone else isn't a better sniper than you.