Thread: Ebay sniping and you...

+1 on gixen.com ; I've had great results from them.

Originally Posted by hoglahoo

Gixen.com allows you several free snipes at any one time

Thanks for the link! I enjoy the manual sniping method but have to put up a little note on the screen so I remember the max amount I'm willing to pay - easy to get caught up in a bidding war!

At the Gixen site it makes the following statement in the Features list:
Gixen is 99.5% reliable.

Huh?!?! Sure hope that doesn't mean that 0.5% of the time it adds another zero to your bid! That could get painful. But if this is a good service, if we ever get to coordinating our bidding here this may be a good tool for us!

Originally Posted by AirColorado

Huh?!?! Sure hope that doesn't mean that 0.5% of the time it adds another zero to your bid! That could get painful. But if this is a good service, if we ever get to coordinating our bidding here this may be a good tool for us!

lol

It means sometimes it doesn't put the bid in on time.

I used to manually snipe occasionally, but rarely anymore. Those auctions that end at 4 am are not worth staying up for if I can let someone else bid for me

Originally Posted by AirColorado

Thanks for the link! I enjoy the manual sniping method but have to put up a little note on the screen so I remember the max amount I'm willing to pay - easy to get caught up in a bidding war!

At the Gixen site it makes the following statement in the Features list:
Gixen is 99.5% reliable.

Huh?!?! Sure hope that doesn't mean that 0.5% of the time it adds another zero to your bid! That could get painful. But if this is a good service, if we ever get to coordinating our bidding here this may be a good tool for us!

Once I was bidding on a rare bicycle head badge. I was willing to go like maybe fifty bucks and being in a hurry to get in my snipe I hit a comma instead of a period. Needless to say I won the auction for more then twice what I was intending to pay.

If you are using Firefox, I can't say enough good about myibay.com: Free eBay Bid Sniper and Auction Manager

It puts an icon on every auction. If you want to snipe, click it and it opens a pop-up where you put in the amount you want to bid. Then you reload your page and it shows your snipe right in the auction. You also can go to your Myibay page and monitor all the auctions you have set snipes on.

I love the flexibility it gives me.

I usually manually snipe with 5 seconds or so. That way I don't have time to rebid. Keeps me from paying more than I want.

Originally Posted by JimmyHAD

I am an unapologetic sniper. I see no sense in driving the price of an item up early just so I have the dubious pleasure of seeing myself listed as the high bidder. I want to see that after the auction is ended and pay as little as possible.

Another advantage in sniping is that by manually sniping with 3 or 4 seconds to go I am not tempted to increase my bid as I might be if I had the time to put another bid in. I lose a lot of them because of that but I save money and I don't really need another razor anyway. Plus I get the adrenaline rush in the last few seconds.

+1 on this, brother. +1.

I'll give a perfect example of why sniping is the only way to bid. About 4 years ago I put in a bid on a neurobiology text. I think I bid about $65 at a point when the current bid was $10. Some moron then entered in twenty seven bids, each time raising his bid by $1.

When I entered my bid for $65, the current bid was $10 and I became the high bidder I think at $14. The moron then put in a bid for $15, then $16, then $17, then..., and finally 27 bids later--$41, and then he quit, so I got the book for $42.

Now, if I had put in a snipe at $65 in the last 5 seconds, the moron would not have had time to put in extra bids. Thus his first bid of $15 would have been the only bid he would have had time to put in, and I would have only had to pay $16. THAT was the last time that I put in a bid without a sniping program.

Gixen saved me a lot of money just by being able to cancel the snipe.

If you bid on the bay you cannot say.. "well I thought it over and maybe it wasn't such a great idea to buy another razor" you can only hope you will be outbid (and thus have someone else pay for your greed)

I've done this a couple of times.. if I want something.. I put in a snipe.. I sometimes adjust the max bid (something you cannot do with a manual bid. I just put in the maximum I'm willing to pay (that is the amount I don't feel bad if someone bid one dollar more and got the item)

And yes I've been outsniped a couple of times and that is just fine... it just means that someone was willing to pay more for the same object...

Maarten

There are a few major benefits to sniping for me:

1) I can change my mind and lower or cancel my snipe without p*ssing off ebay.

2) I can set up group bids, so I can place snipes on several roughly-equivalent items, and the sniping program will place bids on each item as it closes, until I win one of them, then it cancels the rest of the snipes in the batch.

3) Sniping is resistant to shill bidding.

I once won a razor for my max bid, but going through the history I saw that a bidder with no previous bids had come in and bid up to one bid past my max (revealing my max bid), then he canceled that last bid leaving me the winner at my max bid. Yes ebay would be mad at him, but with so few bids in its history this was clearly a throwaway account anyway. I tried to complain to ebay but their complaint form wouldn't allow me to file a complaint for two weeks after the auction "to allow for delivery of the item", which was amusing since I wasn't complaining about the item but about the cheating. The scales fell from my eyes and I signed up for esnipe the next day. By placing my bid with seconds to go there is very little time for the seller to play this shill game with my bid. I haven't placed a standard ebay bid since then.