Originally Posted by RubeRad

Also possibly you are not bidding at the right time. Do you know about sniping?...When you make this a regular practice, (a) you will never pay more than what you calmly value an item to be worth, (b) you will sometimes pay X (perhaps there is another sniper working, or perhaps the actual bid of the auction-leader before you is by coincidence only X-1 -- for this reason, try to choose non-round numbers, like instead of $5.00, do $5.23 or instead of $1000, do $1007.89), or (c) you will often pay less than X (depending on how much larger X is than the auction-leader's actual bid)

Good luck!