Is This A Shill?

[Kevin Parker]

>>>> 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