On 2018-05-01 7:20 PM, Hagstrom, Paul via cctalk wrote:
On May 1, 2018, at 6:06 PM, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org>
wrote:
Personally, I find all of this hilarious. ebay has been shady for as long
as I have watched it. I gave up seriously bidding on "auctions" years ago.
Seems every time I bid and ended out the top bidder it would stay that
way till the auction ended and then suddenly someone beat me by a
dollar.
That's just the way eBay works. You'll win anyway if your bid is higher than
the other person's snipe. eBay auto-bids only whatever it takes to beat you,
so one increment higher. You'll notice that if you bid $1000 on something with
a $10 opening bid, eBay displays this as a bid of $10, and the time runs out
with no other bids, you pay $10. And if someone else bids $20, they lose to
your new automatically placed bid of $21.
I don't think there's any advantage to not sniping, since bidding calls
attention to a thing and does encourage people to bid it up even if your top
snipe bid would beat them. But this is just basically how the eBay game is
played. I used to snipe by hand, now I usually let a bot do it. It bids in
the last couple of seconds, so it can look just like what you describe.
Sniping wouldn't work if auctions didn't have a hard end time, but since they
do, that's how it works and they state it all quite clearly. Maybe sometime
something shady happens though I've yet to see any convincing evidence of it
myself (only people claiming it happens all the time, all the time), but
sniping is not itself shady.
-Paul
I still snipe by hand but that is just a personal decision. If I win
something by sniping it is either because I want it more than other
people bidding or other people bidding have not bid what they are
willing to pay, and from watching auctions in the dying moments I think
the later is often the case as people frantically raise their bids.
Paul.
