On Tue, May 1, 2018 at 5:20 PM, Hagstrom, Paul via cctalk < cctalk@classiccmp.org> 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 > When you say you snipe with a bot, do you mean you use eBay's highest-bid functionality to do it? Or do you use third-party software? I've never been clear on how the built-in highest-bid functionality works. I often see things where the same person has several consecutive bids, which doesn't make any sense to me in the absence of other people's bids in between them. -- Eric Christopherson