Thread: Why Do People Bid on Ebay Auctions Days Before They End?

Originally Posted by blzrfn

If it is something that is listed irregularly and/or something that I really want I will use a sniping program to place my bid. I won't watch or bid through eBay as this increases the visibility to other potential bidders.

This is exactly why I use a sniping app. I don't want to watch anything through eBay. Because they will announce it to others -- "Hey, there is this guy watching a razor just like this one -- over here -- look."

This is especially true for when I find a mislabeled or poorly labeled item. Instead, I add the item to my snipes with $0 bid. Then I can keep up with it.

Last second possible here. I have lost quite a few bidding within 5 seconds only to have someone put more down with less time. I never understood the price running up days before.

I have had non payers run up the price and scare everyone off. Its a game, play it how you like but expect the price to go up with little or no time to change it if I am interested.

I think some people like to bid early in an attempt to try to scare other people off. They may also be using the early bid as an auction reminder, because you can do that on ebay and have ebay send you a reminder later to tell you that bidding is almost over. Kind of a waste of time in my opinion, but free to do.

I have occasionally run across (even recently) folks who think proxy bidding services are unethical and they still refuse to use them. If you say to them "well, that ship has sailed. It's about as widespread as people driving over the speed limit now", they usually don't care (my dad is one of those).

The thing I don't like without using a proxy service is that I can't put in bids on 6 of something and wait until I actually win one and then retract the rest of the bids. That's something that I think ebay should do itself. If that doesn't make sense, think of something you might want (for example, maybe a friodur 472 or something that is on ebay in droves). Maybe the average sale price in the last month is $65, but some have sold for $45 and some for $99 for no real reason other than two people bidding against each other. I like to decide what i"m going to pay (somewhere right around the average or maybe a dollar or two lower), drop the auctions in the snipe service and wait until I win one, then clear out the remaining bids. It makes getting what you're looking for last a couple of minutes rather than agonizing over the end of every auction.

yinz guys are sneaky