I have similar experience. I win a small percentage, but those are at my price (cheap). There continue to be bidders out there that will pay above market for an item. I let them have it, and then pick up the occasional smokin' good deals.

Auctionsniper as well.
My stone knives and bearskins dial-up service precludes accurate sniping in realtime.
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Read:

https://www.innovations-report.com/ht...ort-66750.html
https://www.newscientist.com/article/...-on-ebay-.html

I use www.gixen.com. It's great.

I really need to use a sniper program. Being a nocturnal shift guy so many auctions end when I'm snoozing during the day and a remarkable amount seem to end during my drive to work, or just as I arrive at workspeling erurs and before I get to my office area to bid.

Of course, I've also been known tgo set an alarm just to get up and bid, only to hit the snooze of turn it off.

esniper. It works; it's free. You do need to have a computer connected to the internet 24/7, though.

I used to use snipe-ware, but found it's one shortcoming....


it doesn't raise your bid!!

I don't usually bid unless I want the item, so I take the most I would pay for that item and add $102 my bid.
Works like a charm! (and I've never actually had to pay much more than what it was worth in the first place.)

I take that back. The world championship Matthauser finned brake pads.
They were at $40 when I spotted them. Figured they would get circa $60. So I bid $180.

SOLD!!! (NOT to me) for $272!

OK, it's not death or taxes, so....

esniper was pretty painless to set up and it worked just fine this morning, and I got to sleep an extra hour

I lost the auction but esniper worked perfectly

Funny, Stan, as you got me on the auction way back when for your chrome P15. I was there with my snipe, you sniped at a higher price and won. I was sorry I lost out and happy it went to such a good home. I got my chrome P13 a few weeks later with another snipe.

Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose....

I use auctionsniper and like it a lot; more than helping me win auctions it helps me to keep myself under control.

Also available in the NetBSD ports collection, if anybody else here uses NetBSD...

seems to me you will eventually pay $102 more for something than you want to. I put in the most I
want to pay for an item. If it goes for the minimum bid higher than my max bid, that's more than I wanted to
pay, so I don't care that I lost the bid. Takes a little soul-searching to find that amount.

I told ya. It's the best. Make an auction file then walk away and find out later if you won or not.

As to the percentage of wins or losses, it has nothing to do with the program you use, it has to do with how much you are willing to pay. I could win 100% of the time if I am willing to pay a lot more than what the value of the item is. I have no idea what my percentage of wins to losses are. All I know is what I am willing to pay for an item. I make my choice and have esniper do the bidding for me. I have esniper do the bidding even if I am sitting at the computer. Why sit around waiting for the last second to bid when a computer will do it for you?

Because even if I'm "only" willing to pay $200 I may want to pay $207 to beat a $203 snipe.

In other words, to beat other snipers with the same price-point. Although it's pretty hard to pull off--you usually have to just keep doing one click bids and hope your final click comes after the final snipe but before the auction ends server side.

prehaps your paying too much for the bike because you got wound into a bidding frenzy? You can set an automatic bid in with 2 seconds to go which would not leave enough time for a manuel reaction.

If I really need an item (recently some correct length forks - my bid was 57) I put a very high esnipe in and walked away, and because the bid arrives so late, the other bidders can't pick away at it. If I end up paying alot of money then I'l just have to work a little harder in the week.

The main thing is I don't have to think, oh I can't be out the house at 5:19pm on sunday afternoon because I might get some bike forks!

Snipe programs keep you in control. Without them your more likely to get caught up in the frenzy of an auction and over bid for an item.

Exactly. You bid what you're willing to pay; nothing more. If you don't win, it's because the item sold for more than you were willing to pay.

Either I throw out what its worth to me when I see it, or try to bid in the last few minutes. I lose a lot, but I win plenty: next week another one is going to be on there...

Losing an item to a $202 bid when your snipe was $200 isn't an exercise in self-control, it's just getting beat out.

It's also possible to use a sniper and still monitor the closing seconds to safeguard against this kind of thing. I won't get involved in last minute bidding wars, but I won't let an item that I need or can profit from go to someone else because they got in under the wire for $5 more, if I can help it.

I've used sniping programs before, but loaded up too many and got a few things I didn't want or need. My bad, not the program.

For me, sniping eliminates other people raising my bid. I don't want to early enter $100 on an item I could have gotten for $65, when some person bumps it $5 at a time, then bails. I know for a fact that sellers do this and get away with it via 3rd party bidding. A sniping program would do what I often don't have time to do: watch and wait.

Here's the question, though. 3 snipers are set to 2 seconds. Who wins? I've always wondered if there's a "sniper heirarchy." Or maybe I should put the beer down and go to bed.

Thats the "3 Stooges Effect"... they all try and jump through the door at once.

actually in those cases it comes down to your internet connection or the connection that the bid sniping service is running on... plus server loads and traffic on ebay's end. Basically anything could happen because each bid's fate is determined by the network conditions at that exact moment the packet is sent. We're talking differences of a few milliseconds per hop, but you might have more hops between you and ebay than the other guy and you might get beat because of it. On the other hand in the same situation the routers you need to traverse may have awesomely low latency when you make your bid and you'll end up there faster than the other guy.

Then $200 wasn't the amount you were willing to pay. It was the highest you were hoping that you'd have to pay. $207 was your true willing amount. You just need to decide what is your true willing amount, and not a penny more would you pay and put that amount in the program.

Yep. There's not really much of a chance of both bids arriving truly simultaneously for all the reasons above, and even if both bids hit ebay's network at the same time the database transactions that actually "are" the bids themselves (the bid packets are orders to initiate those database transactions) would not be completed at the same time. So if three bids for the same amount shared the same bid order time-stamp then the bid transactions processed by the database back end subsequent to the first would be rejected for not meeting the minimum increment.

Here's the bidding issue that comes up now and again that really frustrates me - let's say I need a widget and they come up on eBay once ever 3 months or so. I don't want to wait another 3 months to finish my project so if a widget generally goes for $50 I put $75 in the sniping program, thinking nobody is going to outbid me on that! And then the results come in and the widget went for $76 because some other C&V nut like me decided he needed a widget too and did the same thing. I'm sure the seller is very happy. I much prefer the "Buy it Now" option even if they are charging a little more than average.

I knew this was coming. In my view this is an abstract argument of little pragmatic value at best, or a simplistic and self-disadvantaging position at worst. There is no "true" amount that can be determined beforehand. I have to observe the actions of other bidders, ascertain their intentions and decide how little profit I'm willing to make or how badly I want the bike. I want the flexibility to decide I'm willing to make $280 instead of $300, etc. That doesn't necessarily mean I want to enter a higher snipe, for all of the methodological reasons mentioned above (i.e. straw bidders). Consider that my snipes may be below my "true maximum" which remains fuzzy until the dynamics of the auction in its closing moments become clear. Consider that I may be watching multiple auctions and re-prioritizing as the bidding patters for each emerge in the closing hours/minutes/seconds. This is an auction system with particular technological and social affordances that favor careful and flexible tactics, not an econ classroom thought-experiment in market pricing of a single item.

People really seem to need to reassure themselves that they're not getting beaten by refusing to respond to $3 snipes. Maybe because that's because they are, and insisting on a rigidly doctrinaire approach makes them feel better about it.

Sometimes for me, sometimes not. I see an item that is BIN for $40 and jump on it before a bid is placed because my crystal ball tells me it will bid out higher and I need it, (want it)
I see an item that is BIN at $100 and I will put the first bid in at .99¢ to make the BIN go away and bid at the end since the crystal ball told me it won't reach $100.
Not scientific but sometimes it works.