Is This A Shill?

[Hagstrom, Paul]

> 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