>>> Or do you use third-party software?
I use Hammersnipe - I set the maximum I'm prepared to pay and walk away. If I win it
good, if I don?t then that's OK too.
Kevin Parker
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> On Behalf Of Eric Christopherson via
cctalk
Sent: Thursday, 3 May 2018 01:06
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Subject: Re: Is This A Shill?
On Tue, May 1, 2018 at 5:20 PM, Hagstrom, Paul via cctalk < cctalk at
classiccmp.org> wrote:
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
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