![]() How do you expect me to get my $40 SD card? I can't bid on one auction with 3 hours to go because I'll miss hundreds of auctions that close before the one that I bid on. Realize that there are hundreds and hundreds of auctions for 1GB SD cards, most of them end within one or two minutes of each other. Let's assume that I want to pay no more than $40 (~35% discount), but most auctions close for $45-50. There are many auctions for such an item, which retails for about $60. Let's say that I want to buy a commodity item like a 1GB SD memory card. However, the biggest advantage to sniping has nothing to do with other bidders at all. Instead, he just raises the price for me, which is not preferable. He should have bid properly and entered his maximum bid into ebay, if he wanted to win. Sniping helps deal with this problem by not revealing my bid until it is too late for the minimum bidder to do his minimum bid cycle. This drives up the price of the item unnecessarily, because the bidder was never serious to begin with. The minimum bidder: This person bids the minimum, gets outbid by the proxy system, bids the minimum again, and again, and again.He should have bid properly to begin with. But if he failed to correctly identify his max bid and my snipe is higher than what he entered, then I win and he can't get emotional about it. If he had truly entered his max bid like he was supposed to, and if his max bid is more than my snipe, then he's winning the auction anyway. Sniping helps deal with this problem by not allowing an emotional bidder to raise his bid once he is outbid. He gets so caught up in the bidding that he doesn't realize he's paying 150% of retail for a used item and 200% of what he thought he was willing to spend on the item at all. He bids and each time he is outbid he bids some more. The emotional bidder: Bidding is war to this person.Instead, they follow one of the following models: That people don't enter their maximum price when they bid like they are supposed to. If you enter your max right at the last minute, you're guaranteed to get the same results as early bidding, but with a greater potential to save a few bucks. The only way bidding before-hand benefits you is if a second last-minute sniper enters the same or a lower amount as you have previously bid. But it's a pretty good approximation of how a lot of eBayers purchase items, so I'll try to use that past behaviour against them to get me the best bang for my buck. Sure, this is all relatively unknown info - there's no guarantee there will be another bidder, there's no knowledge of what the bids will be, etc. I seldom get outbid by someone who has the same strategy as this - everyone else puts in a low bid, and maybe one more marginally higher bid before the time expires. In this case, I'll walk away with my widget for a paltry $6 after bids. Me, I'll be entering my $20 maximum in the last 10 seconds. Having sold a few items, and bought quite a few more, I know that the most activity usually comes in the last minute, and usually for fairly low amounts. ![]() If there's no bids on that widget with only 30 seconds to go, that other person might try to snipe it for $5. On the other hand, I know that a great majority of eBay bidders are into sniping themselves. Is that someone else going to get caught up in the action and bid $21 or more? Possibly, and in that case, I simply walk away because my max was exceeded. Somebody else sees that there's action on the item, and places their max bid at, say, $10. I place that $20 max bid right away, starting at $1. As a simple example, let's say that I see some widget for which I would pay up to $20. But there's also the psychological advantage of deferring your bid until the end, for items with no bids on them. Sure, you can enter your maximum bid straight away. While a good number of people do indeed overbid because they get drawn into the competitive spirit of winning the auction, there's a simple reason why sniping is still effective: savings. All of this sniping nonsense just proves how ridiculous people treat an auction like ebay (which usually leads them to grossly overpay).
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