I’m an occasional eBay buyer, and have won enough bids to be content, lost enough to wonder why people bid the way they do.
My understanding was that you place you high bid…and if someone is willing to pay more they put in THEIR high bid…and so it goes.
I don’t understand sniping. Can someone explain the reasoning behind using a stand alone program to place bids in the last seconds rather than just doing it a day or two in advance?
Thx
Simply put, to try and make sure you don’t leave enough time for sombody else to react and outbid you.
Cheers,
David
Because you assume there are others who are closely watching the same item that you covet. They do not want to bid more than they have too, so they’re not going to throw all their cards on the table too soon. You sit back, seeming to be out of the game. The snipe is electronically thrown in in the last seconds of the game, before the other bidder has a chance to react and toss in his big play.
Because eBay bidding can take over your brain in a gambling sort of way–cause your ugly competitive nature to rear its head…and you just want to win!
I did it once or twice. It’s been a few years. I don’t want to experience those feelings anymore.
Very interesting .
I’ve never bought or sold anything on E-Bay and have only ever visited the site from links posted here on the Chiff board.
This Snipe device is amusing though..suppose all the hard core E-Bay buyers get one for themselves. It would then be down to whoever could fine tune it down to the nearest split second before the end of the sale.This flurry of cyber activity could crash the system and the item would go to some low tech, low bid guy with a slow dial up connection. Poetic justice at its finest.
Just an idle thought from an idle mind 
Slan,
D.
When I was in Boy Scouts, the older kids would try to take the new ones on snipe hunts, where you go out at night and try to get them lost by pretending to hunt a bird called a snipe with paper bags and flashlights. Our group of new kids didn’t fall for it, but when we were older we tried it on the newbies.
Only trouble was that the kid in charge of it took us all out in the woods at night and got us all lost together. We ended up a couple of miles from camp at the ranger station, who had to drive us back to camp.
Our scoutmaster was, shall we say, dismayed?
eBay has a quite odd addicting power, I agree.
I recently paid nearly a hundred dollars for a book that’s 130 years old and falling apart. I bid much higher, because I didn’t want anybody to outbid me as a sniper. But I’m happy about it because it didn’t go up too far. 
I’ve (manually, no programs) sniped once or twice before…it does seem a bit dishonest or something I’ve to say.
I used to list items on ebay without a “buy it now” option. Sometimes the item ended below what I really wanted to sell it for. However, other times the auction ended well above what I thought the item was worth, relatively speaking. I decided that I was not comfortable listing items like this, so now I only list the item for what I want to sell it for. Even though I am still in the ebay auction section, everyone can see that the opening bid price is the final selling price, and the auction closes after any “buy it now” bid is placed. Using this method of selling, because your initial bid price is higher, there is a higher listing fee, which I accept for the convenience.
With regard to sniping, when you think about the auction process, you soon learn that it doesn’t make much sense to bid early in the auction, unless the auction has a “buy it now” price that you can live with. After all, the basic idea of an auction is to buy an item that you want at the lowest possible price. If I see an item that I would like to purchase, I simply watch the auction. Near the end of the auction ebay alerts me that the auction is about to close. At that point I review the auction and see whether I want to place a bid or not. If the auction is already above what I wanted to pay, I forget it. However, if the price is below what I will pay for the item, I manually place my one and only maximum bid in the last two minutes of the auction. If someone overbids me at that point, no problem. I don’t see this as unethical; it is simply the way that auctions work. If you go to the auction barn, you are competitively bidding against others in the last seconds before the auctioneer announces “sold to the highest bidder”. I agree that it is a bit like poker in that you don’t show your cards until the last moment.
Poker sucks. I wish that eBay were not so evil (and cruel and seedy, of course), but it is the only place to get some items that I want (mostly old, old books).
I like your approach of only listing Buy It Now Items. It seems more honest.
Here’s a bit of history: Way back when, when haggling was common to find a price, the Quakers in early America had fix priced general stores because they felt that asking one price and taking another was dishonest. People came to know that Quaker-owned stores would always give them a fair price, and everybody shopped there for that reason and Quaker stores became prosperous.
The oat people put a picture of a Quaker in ‘plain dress’ (few Quakers dress like that today) on the front of their product and named it ‘Quaker Oats’ for that reason - the way Quakers did business honestly. But the oat people were not Quaker at all. They did it just to make money (and it’s carried through to the present day). It’s really a sad thing. The oat people lied, about honesty in business, in order to get customers.
I try not to eat Quaker Oats products.
It’s probably impossible to design an auction system that is equally fair to buyer and seller. At one time, I devised a system that would lead to the sale price being a midpoint between the highest bidder’s walk away price and the seller’s walk away price. It was a bit complicated, though, and might not be transparent to unsophisticated players. I’ve never tried to market it.
I wonder if sniping could be stopped by simply having a last day for auctions and letting the seller decide when on that day the bidding was over. People who really wanted an item would need to move early in order to ensure their highest bid counted. But I haven’t thought this through; there’s probably an obvious flaw to it.
Stopping sniping is not in the seller’s interest. I have seen too many items go for more than they are worth because of sniping. I was bidding on a used camera tripod head once, and three newbies sniped and bid it up well beyond the retail price of a new one from a web seller - all they had to do was a 2 minute search and they would have known, but they got excited and only the seller got a deal.
The key is to accept that almost nothing on ebay is one-of-a-kind, no matter what the seller says, and something just like it will come around again and again. Bid what you think it’s worth and just let it go. That said, I do bid late in the auction just so others don’t have too much time to think about it, but I don’t snipe any more. (I have hit a couple of auctions with 10 seconds or less - it IS exciting, but too easy to lose control).
Roger
I decide what an item’s worth to me and throw my bid for that in during the last few seconds. So i suppose i’m naughty. 
Selling on eBay i’ve seen sniping quite a lot, and sometimes i’m surprised at what people do actually bid.
It’s all part of the eBay auction experience.
It does go both ways though, with some people having bidding wars over an item when there’s still 5 days to go.
In some Ebay categories, sniping is the rule rather than the exception. Why do people do it?
The disadvantages to sniping for the buyer is having to schedule a time to bid, and the possibility of computer problems on either end at snipe time. The first is minimized by the use of sniper programs, the second is the way it is.
In certain categories, for certain items, entering a strong early bid will result in fewer wins than the same bids entered at closing time. The reasons are that some are very interested in winning if it just means a little bit more money, and newbies do not know how to snipe. For some folks a little bit of money translates into a lot for others. Sniping cuts the newbies and the I-must-win crowd out of the decision loop. The I-must-win crowd is a fair size group and they will often pay up a bit just to win.
To get an idea of how many people have that personality type, look at various threads on the board and how many posters insist on having the last word. When two or more of them get into an exchange it is usually a long (and tiresome) thread. Same deal with an auction–the price can escalate beyond reason if two or more bidders with disposal income have their sights set on an item. This is especially true if there is no real set valuation or market price for the item.
There are other auction sites that automatically extend the ending time by a couple of minutes if a new bid is entered. From a bidders point of view, this is no fun.
On Ebay, the buyer can set a buy it now price, or set a high minimum bid. Often times the exact same item will get a higher price realized with a low mininum, rather than the high start. Why? Again, the thrill of the chase, ego attached to winning, the time investment of already making a bid or two, so a few more dollars is a trade off vs. looking for that same item again.
There is nothing unethical or illegal about sniping. It adds a bit of excitement for the bidder, and uncertainty for the seller. It results in more wins for the sniping bidder compared to entering the same bids much early (reasons given above).
Three problems with this whole criticism that haven’t been mentioned.
The guy on the Quaker Oats box says, “Nobody is better for thee than me.”
He has a cool hat.
And they shoot cereal from cannons!!!
How can they be wrong with that going for them?
I buy store brand cereal anyway because the big names are too expensive.
Another problem with the criticism that hasn’t been mentioned:
–In the 1950s, mentally retarded students were given permission by their parents to belong to the Science Club at Fernald School in Waltham, Massachusetts.
How cool for the kids eh? Sadly no-one told the parents what the “Science Club” actually meant…
They were fed radiation with their cereal to determine the passage of nutrients in the human digestive system. The tests were carried out by Quaker Oats Cereal researchers from MIT. Quaker Oats wanted to prove that nutrients in their cereal traveled throughout the body, so they could win an advertising war against Cream of Wheat, their largest competitor. Quaker Oats hoped that traces of radiation would help them to identify the rates of absorption and elimination of the nutrients. On December 31, 1997, Quaker Oats settled a lawsuit, and 30 of the students were awarded an overall settlement of $1.85 million. Other studies were conducted at Fernald School as well as at Wrentham School in Massachusetts. Experiments on the thyroid gland involved injections of radioactive iodine and the use of radioisotopes for the diagnosing various medical conditions as well as determining the effect of radiation from the iodine on the human body.
It’s well documented.
Well, that’s certainly worse then shooting it from guns.
What really ticks me off is they tried to disrepsect Cream of Wheat.
Seriously, that would be a far greater reason to not eat their stuff then the advertising aspect though there are many products I don’t buy because their advertising angers me.
I understand Cran and Toot’s perspective but using that same logic they would have to quit eating Betty Crocker or Aunt Jemima or Mrs Butterworth or Mrs Grass or Chef Boy-R-Dee etc. etc. etc.
Corn meal mush is better because corn meal is a lot cheaper.
You dont have to boycott Chef Boy-R-Dee. Chef Boiardi of Cleveland ran a popular Italian restaurant that sold sauce. He was commissioned to provide food for the troops during WW2. He eventually sold his recipes to big business.
As far as I can can tell, every can of Beefaroni you eat strikes a blow for democracy.
I have never eaten Beefaroni and I never will. shudder
The reason Quaker Oats bothers me more than some other companies and forms of advertising is the Quaker Testimonies (Peace, Simplicity, Equality, Honesty, etc). That Quaker Oats violates the Honesty Testimony is bad enough, but they also have to abuse the word Quaker to do it. That’s what irks me, perhaps I wasn’t as clear as I could’ve been. It wouldn’t be dissimilar if a company sold bottled war and called it Quaker, or if they sold roast pig and called it Jewish ham, for that matter.
Beefaroni’s fun to eat
Beefaroni’s good to eat
Hooray!
For Beefaroni.
Whew!
I’ve never had it. Can’t stand canned pasta. My wife likes spagetti-o’s but those are Fraco-American.
How is this better than putting that same exact bid at the beginning of the auction? It seems to me that the only difference is that doing it the way you describe is more exciting.
If you put it in at the beginning of the auction, other people get envious that you’re winning the bid and try to outbid you and the price escalates accordingly.
A lot of people have a really stupid competative nature and can’t stand to see someone else winning something.
If you wait till the last few seconds, their envy comes too late for them to do anything about it.