>>>> Or do you use third-party software?
I use Hammersnipe - I set the maximum I'm prepared to pay and walk away. If I
win it good, if I don’t then that's OK too.
Kevin Parker
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk <cctalk-boun...@classiccmp.org> On Behalf Of Eric Christopherson
via cctalk
Sent: Thursday, 3 May 2018 01:06
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk@classiccmp.org>
Subject: Re: Is This A Shill?
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
