Is This A Shill?

[Eric Christopherson]

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