Originally Posted by
The Golden Boy
...If you just bid, and someone else wants to beat you, they simply bid more than you- consciously bid more than you in an effort to bid more than you vs. the snipe that's not entered until the very end, with no time for someone to attempt to beat you.
So the premise of sniping is that the other bidders will increase their maximum bids over what their maximum bids would have been otherwise if they have time to find your maximum bid through a series of incrementally higher bids, when they could instantly determine your maximum bid by simply entering their maximum bid? This assumes that bidders who don't snipe are significantly less sophisticated bidders than those who snipe, which is probably true in some cases. I'm not so sure in the case of collectibles.
...Had I shown my interest, the price could have been twice that.
How do you know? Sounds like there was another sniper whose high bid was $1499 (or whatever), and you won the auction at $1500 with a high bid of $2000. Same outcome as if you both would have entered your high bid at the start of the auction.
I'm sure ebay has stats on the difference of final sales prices for both types of auctions. That would be interesting to see, as it's not obvious to me that sniping results in a systematically lower selling price.