Hidbid.com is another sniping service you may want to give a try.
Everyone has pretty much covered the benefits of sniping.
All buyers should be happy with sniping as even if you do not snipe, knowing that there will be snipers most likely bidding on the item that you want to bid on, you have to decide on your absolute maximum bid and either place your bid right away or schedule a snipe (or do it manually). That's it. You win or you lose, but no second-guessing. If you win, you got a good deal. If you lose, the winner paid too much.
There's a couple of things you have to watch out for when sniping - that you are qualified to bid on the item that you're interested in, and that there are no special noticess shown by eBay before the bid confirmation page is shown.
What you can do to check is just enter a bid and on the item and click the "Place bid" button. Your bid will not be placed immediately as you will have to confirm it on the next page by clicking a "confirm bid" button (which you will not do). If the next page shown is the bid confirmation page, all should be well. If you see a special notice, this adds an extra step to the bidding process and will prevent your snipe from being executed.
Actually, this could probably easily be worked through, however, with hidbid anyway, it is set up so that these now notices are not automatically bypassed as it is probably a good idea for you to read the notice to know any special information about the item, or similar items in general.
I know that when a toy is the auction item, a 'possible recall' notice will be shown before the bid confirmation page. Some sort of notice is shown before the bid confirmation page, when the auction item is a ticket or tickets to events.
Those are the notices that I am aware of.

You also need to be sure that you are qualified to bid on an item. Sellers can put restrictions on countries that they ship to, accepted payment methods (PayPal, which, is about the only payment method available on eBay nowadays anyway), can block bidders who have bid retractions in the last month or even the last year I think, and having a certain amount of feedback (not sure but I think that it can only be set to block bidders with an overall negative rating).
Checking for the bid confirmation page will not help in making sure that you are eligible, only actually clicking on the "confirm bid" button would let you know.
However, just look at the item listing page to see where the item ships (if you're in a different country than the seller) and/or contact the seller to see if there is a feedback rating or bid retraction restriction on the item.