Sniping on eBay: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

I totally disagree with you about sniping. Out of curiosity, I put my highest bid on an item an hour before the auctions end. Half an hour later, the previous highest bidder placed another bid. Had I sniped, the other bidder would not have known I was going to bid – I rest my case.

Though I agree with you about the sniping services out there, I find it funny how the proxy-bidding system, your main reason why people shouldn’t snipe, contradicts your statement on why sniping is bad. You assume the sniper always bid the minimum amount. Contrary to your belief, snipers also bid the max amount they’re willing to pay. For example, if the current item is $6.00 and the min price to bid is $6.25, I’m not going to bid $6.25 but $25. Yet if the previous highest bidder wins, I’ll be gracious in defeat because I’m not willing to pay more than $25 for the item.

Of course, if you like bidding wars be my guest; I’ll stick with my sniping.

Have you ever sniped, let alone use a service? After reading your article I don’t believe you have. It appears you think that sniping programs and services make the minimum bid, then see if they are outbid before making a higher bid. THIS IS NOT THE CASE! A sniping service enters the maximum bid that you have instructed them to make a few seconds before the auction closes. After that, it’s up to Ebay’s proxy bidding feature to determine who wins based on maximum bids. It prevents the other bidder from seeing that they’ve been outbid and, in the heat of the moment, making a higher bid that results in either a loss or a higher selling price.

Your readers can see for themselves how this works by watching any hotly contested item on Ebay. They’ll see bids being made by the same bidder in several increments over a period of time until other person’s bid is topped. If this were a snipe, they wouldn’t have the chance to do that. It essentially turns the auction into a sealed-bid auction where the highest maximum bid at auction close wins.

Regarding whether to trust a sniping site with your Ebay info – Are you saying that sniping sites are run by criminals? How would they stay in business if they violated their customer’s privacy? And how are they going to get my financial info? That’s an entirely separate service (PayPal) with it’s own login and password, which I’m certainly not giving to ANYONE, nor is it somehow already in my Ebay profile. Snipers can bid for me, but I still have to pay for the item manually.

Please revise this misleading article. It detracts from the authority of the about.com website.

What the article says about proxy bidding makes sense, but on the other hand, I think sniping can still help in that it can avoid a bidding war. If several bidders really want the item, they may post increasingly higher maximum bids in order to try to win; however, if I were to snipe right at the end of the auction, I may end up winning and avoiding a bidding war, thus getting a good price.

Very often, there seem to be bidders who are always willing to pay more than a reasonable price for an item, and I think that’s where eBay’s proxy bidding system fails. If I bid the highest price I’m willing to pay and then ignore the auction until it ends, that just leaves the door open for someone else to bid higher and higher until they have the highest bid.

Another note – I’ve read about online sniping services that collect your eBay username and password; I feel uncomfortable giving out my username and password, so instead, I’ve used sniping software on my own computer, such as iSnipeIt. iSnipeIt was made specifically for eBay, but unfortunately, it currently no longer works properly; their web site says eBay has made significant changes, and they (iSnipeIt) are in the process of re-writing it so that it works properly again with eBay.

I forgot to add the following:

Regarding “Bid Canceling”: Sniping sites aren’t talking about canceling bids on Ebay. They’re talking about canceling your bid instructions on their sniping server. Once you make a maximum bid on Ebay they won’t let you decrease the maximum, even though the actual bid price is still lower. You also can’t cancel the bid (with a few exceptions). You can if you entered the same bid with a sniping service, because the service doesn’t actually bid on Ebay until the end of the auction. You can retract at any time before the server commits it to the Ebay site. How many times have you made a bid, found a better deal later and wished you could unbid the earlier auction? If your bid is on a sniping service, you can.

Finally, one of the most compelling features of sniping services that you’ve overlooked is group bids. I wanted a new video card. I found all the auctions that sold the card I wanted. I then made a group on the snipe site and added each of those auctions to the group. I set my price for the bid in each auction. Then I went camping for the weekend. While I was enjoying myself, I lost the first two auctions but won the third. At that point, all the remaining bids for auctions in the group were canceled. You can’t do this in Ebay with proxy bidding. You can’t tell Ebay that you want to retract your related bids because you won an item, so you have to bid on one item, wait for it to finish, then bid on another item if you didn’t win. Meanwhile, your family is telling you your obsessed with Ebay because you don’t have time to do anything else.

I have to agree with Gwen regarding sniping as that I also disagree heavily with the author of the article.

What I have found that a number of auctions people can get emotive with their biddings and the incremental bidding simply raises that price. above the bidder’s expectations. When it comes to sniping, remember that the old saying that you never show your hand until right at the very end.

There are two important rules when it comes to bidding which includes sniping. First – Never fall emotionally with the item. There will be other bargains around if you look hard enough. Second – Never bid over what you believe is the maximum value.

What I have found numerous times is that incremental bidding brings a false sense of wanting. An hour before closing, you make your maximum bid where 30-minutes later someone else bids above you. It is human nature for the bidder then feels that he or she has had the item taken away from them so they feel that they should bid higher. This is why you take the emotion away and bid at the end before you make your move.

I agree with the others that the author of the article has it wrong.

In a world of perfectly rational buyers, sniping would be useless; everyone would determine for themselves how much they were willing to pay, place their bids via eBay’s built-in proxy system, and that would be the end of it.

We do not live in such a world.

Some eBayers underbid, placing an initial bid lower than they would actually be willing to pay, in an effort to “test the waters” before making a commitment. If the initial bid fails or is later outbid, they’ll come back with a higher bid.

Some eBayers overbid. They get caught up in the battle to claim an enticing item and bid more money than they really want to spend. Their restraint in placing the initial bid gives way to the urge to win. (eBay feeds this urge by sending e-mails that say, “Don’t let it get away!”)

In both cases, sniping is a winning counter-tactic. The underbidders, seeing their low bids apparently leading the auction, are lulled into a false sense of security. The overbidders never have a chance to get excited.

(Sniping is *also* helpful to keep the sniper from getting caught up in these same irrational behaviors…)

Although, I agree with the above, please keep in mind that the whole reason to snipe is to keep your bid as anonymous as possible until the last possible second. So, placing a small bid at the beginning of an auction gives yourself away to those bidders who follow your buying trail. Lastly, although eBay does have a proxy bidding system, a user would have to be available at the last seconds of the auction to enter their proxy bid on eBay themselves. eSnipe places your proxy bid on eBay at the last seconds of the auction for you. Which means that you don’t need to be anywhere near your computer at bid time and nobody knows about your bid until it’s too late to intentionally enter a manual bid to top you, abd this helps prevent bidding wars and keeps the final cost of the item down. As long as you are the highest bidder by at least one bid increment, you win!

This article is mostly promoting ebay for its own advantage. Ebay certainly promotes emotional bidding wars for their higher commision revenue and to encourage sellers. OK, this is fair enough, but such a transparent promotion turns off discriminating users.
That being said, MAKE SURE you thoroughly vet any sniping service you are considering. Pick one that has been around for awhile and READ their internal forms first.

The guy that wrote this article is a moron. I love the way he assumes that snipers fire away with a reduced amount. Wrong! Most snipers are advanced bidders and know exactly what they’re doing. They realize that sniping in the last seconds means they only have one chance at it and they typically do a very good job of understanding just how much they are willing to pay for an item.

Fact: It’s true that if all eBay bidders entered their maximum bids the first time around that sniping would lose much of its strategic advantage.

Fact: Millions of eBay bidders do NOT use the proxy bidding system properly.

Fact: That leaves thousands of opportunities a day for snipers to save money.

Sniping (and by extension, snipers) on eBay takes advantage of the morons who don’t understand the concept of placing their maximum bid the first time around. Since there are thousands of people out there that fit that description, sniping is useful (and will continue to be unless eBay begins extending auctions automatically after each bid).

We could stop there, but here are some other features of sniping that are useful. Some of these have already been brought up in other comments.

Fact: Bid groups are extremely useful tools when a buyer is attempting to locate and buy an item that is very common.

Fact: Bid canceling is very useful. With sniping programs it’s typically a snap. With eBay it’s a pain in the ass (though technically possible). Advantage: sniping.

Again, don’t listen to the author of this article. He either doesn’t know what he’s talking about, or has some secret agenda. Either way, he’s simply wrong about the utility of sniping.

Jason