2 May
2018
2 May
'18
3:06 p.m.
On Tue, May 1, 2018 at 5:20 PM, Hagstrom, Paul via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
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
On May 1, 2018, at 6:06 PM, Bill Gunshannon via
cctalk <
cctalk at 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