Date: Thu, 27 Oct 2005 14:49:41 -0700 (PDT) From: David Ross <dlr94306@yahoo.com> To: classicrendezvous@bikelist.org Subject: [CR]Sniping?
Alan Lloyd wrote:
"I'm missing something here: why does a sniping service do much more for you than eBay's own bidding mechanism, except submit your bid(s) at the last moment?
Your maximum is your maximum, unless you increase it, either you win - or somebody else has a higher maximum!"
To which David replied: I have been second high bidder more times than I care to count (probably a good thing, though, or I'd be that much poorer). It almost always happens on an item I want, but not badly. I'll put in my highest reserve near the start of the auction, and I will be the high bidder for most of the time. Towards the end of the auciton someone will start "probing" for my maximum bid - entering higher bids until they get one increment higher. That usually wins it for them.
If I really want an item, I wait until the last possible moment to submit my highest possible bid. Call it non-automated sniping. I've gotten pretty good, and can usually get that bid in with less than 10 seconds to go, which will beat most sniping programs. I'm convinced that if I used this tactic all of the time it would eliminate "probing" and I would win more auctions. But then I would need a bigger warehouse. And I would have to quit my day job to spend more time on the 'bay.
Dave "I've got $90, who will give me $95" Ross Portola Valley, CA ------------------------------
As a self-acknowledged eBay junkie (I could quit anytime, honestly.....! Yeah, right!), this thread has been very interesting to me. I'll make a bold statement - IMO, 95% of the time, no one should ever bid on an eBay item more than five seconds before the end of the auction. With my cable modem, I can easily time it to the last two seconds very reliably. I wish I could do it at one second to go! The bad thing is that I need to be at my PC at that moment (unless I use a sniping tool) in order to do that. By only bidding at the last moment, several potentially bad things are avoided, and several potentially good things can happen. Shill bidding and newbie irrationality do exist, so if you wait until two seconds to go, you pretty much can't get shilled, or slammed to your max by an over-eager newbie. If you are a knowledgeable bidder in a country that allows everyone else to see what you are bidding on (ahem...), many, many people will likely look at all of your current bidding and catch little "nuggets" that you've found, so why give them that information? Watch the items until the last second, then pounce. Stealth and knowledge are about the only weapons in your eBay arsenal - absolutely everything else favors the sellers! Greg "gotta run, eBay beckons" Parker Ann Arbor, Michigan