Thread: I'm so sick of sniping software!!!

I'll second JoshEarl's recommendation for http://www.gixen.com (AND IT IS FREE)

Of the 5 razors I have won through eBay, I have snagged them using Gixen. And it is convenient that I dont have to sit around and watch the auction end. I just set my max price and it does its thing.

I have lost quite a few razors with Gixen as well, just by not setting my max bid price high enough to outbid the competition.

With a 3rd party bid sniping program you get no guarantees that you will win, or that it will even place your bid for you.


Give it a try Gawker, just throw your bidding morals out the window for just one auction.

Yep, Gixen works great - won two razors with it.

Thanks guys I'll check out Gixen and see what happens.

I usually do my "sniping" the old fashioned way... by submitting my bid during the last few seconds of the auction. When sniping software started showing up (and I started losing bids) I immediately blamed it on the software. They shouldn't allow it, yada, yada. Then I realized the problem wasn't the software... the problem was I wasn't setting my max bids high enough. I could manually snipe almost as well as software snipes when I set my bid high enough. You can too, Gawker.

But I do use it occasionally... mostly when I'm bidding on something that ends when I'm unable to be online at the auction close. I just picked a free package off of SourceForge... there's several.

The one I have has a nice feature (maybe they all do... I've only ever used one). I like to use it to get good deals in a slightly different way. Suppose I wanted to get a particular coffee pot. There's hundreds of auctions for them every day. I pick out a dozen or two that meet my criteria for shipping charges. I set them all up on the snipe software and it will bid to my max price on each of them until I win one, then it terminates my activity on that series. This allows me to set a ridiculously low price and still win without having to spend my life in front of the tube. To show you how effective that can be, I got a camera that usually goes for about $250 for 165... I had several dozen auctions set up over a weekend and for some reason one particular auction didn't have many people bidding on it... bingo!! The rest of the auctions all closed for over $200. This feature is useless for bidding on razors, but if you need a chain saw, a coffee pot, etc. it's great. It took me several months (because the particular microwave I wanted was low volume) but I got what normally sells on eBay for >$350 for $165. It's purely a chance thing.

Can I ask what package you use? It sounds like a good thing since I don't JUST buy razors on eBay.

That sounds like esnipe's bid group feature. I've used it several times to good effect.

For your pc-based sniping program, how do you keep your pc's clock synchronized with ebay's clock? One advantage of the web-based sniping services is they handle all that for you, so you can pretty reliably cut your snipe window down to only a few seconds.

Actually I'd like to take a stab guess at that and say that eBay is probably clocked on US atomic time. There are MANY different programs available for syncing your PCs time to atomic, the simplest of which would be Atomic Clock Sync by World Time Server.

Originally Posted by mparker762

That sounds like esnipe's bid group feature. I've used it several times to good effect.

For your pc-based sniping program, how do you keep your pc's clock synchronized with ebay's clock? One advantage of the web-based sniping services is they handle all that for you, so you can pretty reliably cut your snipe window down to only a few seconds.

I don't know how it does it... all I know is it asks if you want to sync to ebays clock and if you say yes it does. I'd guess it uses the same technique the online guys use.

Honestly, I think the hoopla over latency and how fast the online guys are compared to a pc-based program is mostly marketing hype. Once you're inside 4-5-seconds of auction end it doesn't much matter what snipe approach you're using... it's what your max bid is that determines whether you win or lose. I can be inside 4-sec just eyeballing it manually. Most of the auctions I lose are because I won't bid high enough to win... so when I place my max bid has little to do with it (unless there's a tie or it's a multiple quantity auction). I'm not throwing rocks at the on-line services... lots of people use them and love em. I'm just sharing that I've been happy with what I use... and it's free... and it happens to run on my PC.

IMHO, what the sniping software does is eliminate the guy with a feedback score of 2 sitting at his computer and upping the bid by a dollar at a time until he maxes out your bid -

what I do is put a ridiculously low bid in to keep junior happy, and use Gixen.com to snipe my real world bid - if it goes for more than that, well, then I didn't want it - if someone else snipes higher than me, then it will show that they beat my bid by $1, but they might have put in a much hgher snipe bid, and eBay just outbid me by the minimum bid increment....it doesn't matter....I put my maximum in...any thing more, and I'm not interested.

...but it does give me the opportunity to occasionally pick up some deals for a dollar more than junior bid, which was a dollar more than my first, ridiculously low bid.

I like the automatic sniping software- high bidder gets it - and it gets you away from the emotional/auction bidding syndrome

YMMV - and probably will!

-whatever

-Lou

Gawker is corect. I have one of the clocks that syncs every morning at 6 AM. Perfect match to ebay.

I've won a few by pennies when my bid was sitting there a couple of hours in advance, like this one. http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...2076&rd=1&rd=1

I've also pm members, that I recognized, that have taken a razor from me that I really didn't need, in the last ten seconds and thanked them.

Rick