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How to Win on Ebay: Snipe
grammar fascist writes "A study by South Korean physicists confirms what some of us have taken for granted for a long time: a single bid at end of auction nets the most wins. From the article: 'Plugging all those data into the model and testing the outcome in terms of how the auctions turned out, the team found that the probability of submitting a winning bid on an item indeed drops with each bid. "Our analysis explicitly shows that the winning strategy is to bid at the last moment as the first attempt rather than incremental bidding from the start." The study appears in the current Physical Review E journal.'"
Proxy bidding is supposed to allow easy auctions with fairness. The problem is the sniping phenomenon. And there is an easy fix: A bid will extend the auction by ~10 minutes if received in the last 10 minutes. Voila, no more sniping.
Test your net with Netalyzr
but I bet this is the best strategy to result in lowest prices at the end of the auction and this is the strategy I've been using for the past six years to win and keep the costs to a minimum.
You can't handle the truth.
How does a story that gets tagged as "duh" even before there are any comments posted get onto slashdot? Save these stories for ZDnet, Business 2.0, and others...
Having a limit time is stupid, it challenges the whole auction principle. There should be a limit time, when there is less than 1 hour left, each new bid resets the remaining time to one hour.
Alternatively a blind auction where the winner is the one who offers the highest price and pays the price of the second + a bid increment.
\u262D = \u5350
should i wait to say "First Post" 7 days from now?
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
The last bid wins...
. . . East Ukrainian dentists declare in their recent study that "Manned spaceflight is more difficult than they thought."
(Seriously . . . shouldn't physists be studying . . . I dunno . . . physics?)
"Our analysis explicitly shows that the winning strategy is to bid at the last moment as the first attempt rather than incremental bidding from the start."
Sure, but does that get you the best price? The whole point of eBay's bidding system is that you supply your maximum bid, and they bid for you up to that amount. Thus, you spend less time spamming F5, and you get the best possible price (assuming your max is high enough). Sniping is best used for snatching rare items for which money is no object and using it on any old item is both a waste of time and possibly money.
This sig rocks the casbah.
First off, we needed a study to tell us this? Second, these were physicists? Pardon me if I'm not seeing the physics in online auctions.
If this story were on Fark.com, I think it would merit the 'still no cure for cancer' tagline.
If you bid more than once on an item, someone must be bidding against you, so of course your chances are reduced.
If you only bid once on an item, it could be the only bid. I wonder if they controlled for that.
Fellowship 9/11
Ebay allows users to set their secret maximum bid, so in a rational world a bidder just sets this at the highest price he's willing to pay. However, rational thought has nothing to do with markets (except in economics textbooks, for some reason), so people keep ratcheting up their maximum bid to win. The result is that the "max bid" system doesn't perform as it was intended, but it was a good idea.
Not the first good idea to be defeated by irrationalism, and not the last.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
People like to bid based on even dollar amounts. I've won auctions by bidding 2-3 cents more than the even dollar amount.
For example, if you want to bid $20 for something, bid $20.02 instead so if somebody else puts a bid of $20 on it, you still win.
I ALWAYS do this, and it makes me wonder what idiots bid on something early? What advantage is there to ever do that? I suppose I could see if you didn't have time to bid at the end of the auction, but driving the price up yourself is hardly the way to get the lowest price.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
This is retarded.
http://www.uncoverip.com/
Sniping has been around since the beginning of auctions, it's not new just because of Ebay.
/whisper/ Thanks for the candy!
Is this really the most valuable work a TEAM of physicists can be doing? What about global warming, finding efficient fuels, etc.
Could someone please explain to me how this is physics? (I'm guessing it was a slow day in the physics lab.)
The acutal paper is from 2000. This has been tought for the past 3 years in an undergraduate eCommerce course.
The paper has an interesting comparison between eBay and Amazon, for two distinct cases: common value and private value.
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
believe anything from SOuth Korea, for a while?
I've been sniped many times on EBay auctions, and it doesn't really bother me at all -- there is automatic bidding that will increase your bid to your maximum if someone tries to snipe you. In the end, they valued the item more than I did.
But why doesn't EBay operate like flesh-and-blood auctions? Keep the bidding open for the normal duration of time, but then extend the auction time whenever a new bid is placed? You know, like "going, going, gone!" Fairly easy to add 3 or 5 minutes to the end of an auction -- and those who haven't set incremental bidding can still get in on the close if they want to.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
That's a very good idea. (The more I think about it the more I like it.) There is a problem, though, in that it will not help out folks who live in different time zones. If the auction ends at a time when I would rather be asleep then the extra 10 minutes will not help. The bidders on ebay are spread out over a very large geographic region which makes it difficult to insure some sort of fairness about the end time of an auction.
I have heard that Idea before, and it seems to be a win win for everyone, why won't ebay chage their model?
Ebay gets more money for the sale (% of final price) and seller gets more money too. Well, the buyer has to
pay more, but getting sniped at the end of the auction you really wanted sure sucks, so in that way the buyer
wins.
music lover since 1969
Studying ebay counts as physics in South Korea?
What's the probability of overpriced shipping?
What?
1 Snipe eBay auctions
2 ?????
3 Profit!
Actually, I have a forumla that gives the best chance of winning an auction: bid 10x what the item is worth. Can I have some money to study the obvious^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H research the tricky questions of our age now please?
The fact that this was tagged as duh before it had any comments is very telling.
If all you have is a grenade, pretty soon every problem looks like a foxhole -- MightyYar
Sniping isn't a "problem." It's both saved me money (as sniper), and prevented me from buying stuff I didn't want THAT much (as snipe-ee.)
Proxy bidding is supposed to allow easy auctions with fairness. The problem is the sniping phenomenon. And there is an easy fix: A bid will extend the auction by ~10 minutes if received in the last 10 minutes. Voila, no more sniping.
Yahoo! Japan already does something similar... I think its 15 minutes. Makes things much more fair for the seller.
-FL
Heisenbidding: You can know how much you will pay, OR if you'll get the item or not, but you can't know both.
as done on Amazon, but then traders of specialty items, such as rare books, do not sell there because the dealers tends to win over the experts. Read the paper for details.
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
One bid, one win.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Good fix. It amounts to the digital equivalent of "Going once.... going twice......... sold!"
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
If you put in the maximum you are willing to pay for it at the start, you can't be sniped.
Great in theory, but what about time sensitive items? Ala tickets? I often bid on (and sometimes win) tickets off of ebay, and sometimes I win and get delivery (electronic tix) just hours before an event.
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
... unless the item has a 'Buy It Now' button.
Technoli
Hmm, seems similiar to how human run auctions are done - after every bid there is the option for another bid - it only ends after a time period has passed since the last bid.
Even better for ebay - make 90% of the auctions 1 day as that is what most people look at anyway (except some high-dollar/rare items)
Please correct me if I am wrong, but I thought that ebay already had measures in place to prevent sniping from being effective. When you enter a bid on ebay, you enter the highest amount you are willing to pay for an item. Ebay does not immediately place a bid for this amount, but instead only bids 10% more than the next highest bidder. Should someone place a higher bid, ebay will place a new bid in your name which is 10% higher than the previous one, and will continue doing this for you until your highest bid amount has been exceeded. I was under the impression that this system prevented sniping from being effective. Could someone please explain how sniping works in light of ebay's anti-sniping system?
Open another account and bid against yourself. I watched my friend do this over the weekend. He sells stuff he and his wife get from yard sales. If he thinks something is worth more then the $1 starting bid, he waits till there is about 5 minutes left, fires up IE and bids $2 (he uses Firefox to stay logged in under his seller name). 75% of the time he does this, the bid jumps to $3 via a proxy bid. This guy is a regular everyday Joe, not someone looking for ways to beat the system, in fact he did not understand why he had to use IE to log into the second account but he knew it "worked somehow". The system is so obviously easy to beat, he takes advantage of it. His perfect 100% positive feedback after 250 transactions gives no indication he is scamming people either.
well using the weapon analogy, isn't it best to fire a mortar volley a few hours prior, then to go in with the long arms?
I've always found a initial bid with max bid of like 60% of what you want to pay, then just wait around until the end then raise your max, has worked out well for me. Though theres nothing stopping other douchebags like me from bidding just to raise the amount you have to pay. . . I mean, I've NEVER done that. . .
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
Wouldn't eBay's automatic bidding prevent that? If you were willing to bid $20 and it was currently at $10, th esniper needs to bid $21 to win, which is in theory more than you were willing to pay. Personally I'm suspicious of such tools, but the idea is in the event of a tie the earliest bidder wins, right?
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
They do this on Yahoo auctions in Japan, though it may only be an option and not compulsory.
How is this such a problem? I don't really get what is not "fair" about sniping?
If the dumbasses that got their auction "stolen" at the last minute didn't put in the absolute maximum that they wanted to pay for the item, then that's their own fault. Either your willing to pay more than anyone else or your not. If you don't put your maximum bid in straight off and keep incrementing your bid, you are really just engaging in really inefficient sniping.
Adding a ten minute extension wouldn't really solve this. It would work great for sellers because the emotionally invested bidders would run up their bids more than they otherwise would. The buyers however would be better off just joining the snipers rather than fighting them. If everyone sniped it would basically revert to the pre-sniping days.
What did they have to do a research project to find out that sniping bids works.
I never chase ebay auctions it's a suckers play.
I use freeware for my sniping.
jbidwatcher http://www.jbidwatcher.com/
zbeast
Sniping works when people don't actually know what something is worth. Every time you make a bid, you literally raise the price of the item: you declare that it's worth at least this much to you. And if nobody knows what the price is, they know that it's worth a little bit more when you raise the price.
By sniping, they lower the final price by hiding the information of what they're willing to bid. The auto-bidding feature is supposed to do that for you, but information still leaks out: it tells you the value of the second-higest bid, which is probably close to that of the highest bid. It's a good proxy of the actual price, and you're raising that.
Personally, I don't get too bugged about the snipers. I know what it's worth to me and let the auto-bidders handle it. If I get sniped, it means they were willing to pay more than I was. The seller gets screwed a bit, because the sniper was hiding their willingness to pay more (and therefore probably more than they ended up paying.) But the only thing being done to me as a bidder is that I got my hopes up.
So I don't get my hopes up, and I don't bid on eBay for anything I really, really want. I use eBay not for its auction, but for its flea-market: the ability to get stuff I can't get elsewhere. I usually just pay the "buy it now" price.
You hardly need a scientific study to realize sniping is going to be more successful than incremental bidding -- you eliminate the opportunity for a counter bid, and if you are careful you can leave yourself just enough time to make one additional incremental bid without exposing yourself much to other bidders. Sniping isn't such a bad thing for the following reason:
Your solution would certainly appear to be of benefit to sellers on the surface, but it would stike a blow against one of the main attractions of EBay -- the chance to snag a deal! EBay is unlikely to add a feature that reduces the number of bidders it attacts, because this would hurt EBay and the sellers far more than a bit of sniping.
Well, there you have it...like most things in life, you gotta figure out what you want and how badly.
If there is something I really want, I've set my alarm to wake up just to bid on the item...and crash back again after it is over.
I see nothing wrong with sniping. If you have set your bid to the absolute maximum you are willing to pay, and not a cent more...if no one snipes it at that $$ amount...you will still win. If someone outbids your bid at the last second...well, in your mind you should say.."They paid too much for that..."
This works pretty closely to a live auction. People can keep bidding till the hammer drops. Sure, it keeps going while bids keep coming in, but, that is the little difference between eBay and a live auction. At least with eBay you CAN win and don't HAVE to be there live.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
robnator's a bit slow... if everyone snipes to win auctions, what's the trouble? If you really wanted it, you'd snipe with bids like $1000...
thing with the auction concept is you're SUPPOSED to bid what you'd like to pay if no one else is running up the price (rinse. lather, repeat) until you reach your wallet's limit. eBay's modification imposes a time limit to keep auctions from taking forever, but with the maximum bid concept it brings its 'auction' back towards the original.
the reason people snipe (vs. just bidding their personal maximum to start) is fear of being run up by shills. it's a survival mechanism for your money, if such a thing isn't self-contradicting on eBay...
"If...you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning" - Catherine Aird
The reason sniping works is because most people don't enter their maximum bid to begin with, instead they increase their bid when their are outbid and with sniping they have no time to do that.
Also, when there are more bids on an item it becomes more desirable, which usually causes the price to go up - with sniping that effect is gone.
I think the rationale behind the time-limts on eBay auctions was the idea that the longer an auction is listed, the more "eyeballs" get a chance to view it. eBay could also make the argument that auctions that run longer are more "expensive" for them to host in terms of system resources and bandwidth. Therefore, they could justify billing higher initial listing fees, relative to the time-limits imposed on them.
But yeah, "sniping" has gotten so prevelant on eBay that on any given item, you're pretty much either going to be the *only* bidder due to it being so specialized that barely anyone would want it, or you're going to have to snipe at the end to win it.
I think you're correct that moving to secret bids might make the most sense for both eBay and users. Let it work just like it does today, except give all auction listers the option to set a "reserve price" at no extra charge, and then only display the reserve or starting bid amount until the end. Indicating the number of people who placed bids would be incentive for people to bump up their high bid, if they start getting scared they've got competition - but that's probably all that needs to be shown. Not only would secret auctions eliminate the sniping issue, but it would also put a stop to shill bidding.
Keep in mind that "winning" an auction only means that you're willing to pay more for something than anyone else...
Well, the buyer has to
pay more, but getting sniped at the end of the auction you really wanted sure sucks, so in that way the buyer
wins.
If you "really wanted" the item, why wasn't your maximum bid price higher?
When I buy something on eBay, I always bit the most I'm willing to pay for the item. The items I win are usually nowhere close to what my maximum bid could have been, and the items I don't win sold for more than I was willing to spend.
Snipers cost people like me nothing. The only way they can hurt you is if you are compulsive spender who suddenly wants something even more just because somebody else was willing to pay $1.50 more than you originally thought it was worth.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
As the article says, sniping will only help you if the bidder you're trying to beat was willing to raise his own bid but didn't have the chance. This will only happen if the bidder you're trying to beat is inexperienced, stupid, untrusting of the automatic bid system, etc. However, since many such people bid on ebay, sniping certainly helps from time to time.
eBay has certainly considered and rejected this idea. If this were an auction type offered on eBay, every rational seller would choose it.
The reason it's not offered is that eBay is more dependent on bidders than sellers at the end of the day. Yes, sellers pay the fees to eBay, but sellers are less mobile than buyers - if a seller is not going to use eBay, what will they use? No other auction site has traffic within an order of magnitude of eBay. Most sellers' only other rational option is a local fixed-price sale through, e.g. craigslist - not an acceptible option to many sellers. Thus, how the sellers feel about sniping is immaterial to eBay - they're the only game in town and the sellers will come anyway.
OTOH, buyers care less about where they buy things than sellers do about how they sell them. Change the rules on eBay at this point and they will alienate their base of idiots^Wbuyers - the traffic that keeps eBay the only game in town. They already have a major fraud problem that's driving sales of some especially fraud-prone categories like computers and electronics to sites focusing on local cash deals like craigslist. The last thing they want is to change anything else that might alienate buyers.
(Yes, some buyers hate sniping, but most buyers hate bidding wars even more. Anything that helps sellers raise their average sale price hurts buyers, and since the buyers are what bring in the sellers...)
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
It would be interesting to see if you could predict the outcome of a simultaneous snipe on systems with identical connections to see which signal eBay accepts or prefers?
It would be interesting to know (in that nanosecond) how eBay's servers choose the winner and if there was any 'sniping bias' found. Maybe we can get the Mythbusters on this one.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Real life auctions don't have a set time to bid upon them - they keep going until after no one bids for a while. What if you were to extend this to ebay? i.e. I try to snipe at the last 30 seconds of the normal ending time, but that automatically extends the auction by 10 minutes or so. Would that solve all issues? ( beyond the fact that you could extend it forever, but I'm sure that could be solved ).
This has been tried in the past (especially on Yahoo auctions) and it's simply not popular).
Sniping simply changes the auction to a sealed bid auction. When it comes to bidding, just bid what you want to pay, then see if you won.
Full disclosure--I worked for a sniping service for 6 months. I don't work there now, but would never seriously bid without such a service
South Korea!
First they had a veterinarian who claimed to clone the first human!
Now they have a PHYSICIST who claims to be an expert on EBAY AUCTIONS!
Next up: a lawyer who can communicate with dolphins!
Yay Korea! Insane on both halves of the peninsla!
Cool. Here I was thinking that this was my own, little strategy. Highspeed internet connection, plus place max bid in the last 30 seconds + have maxbib %2 = 1.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
eSnipe will snipe items at your behest, so you don't have to be sitting around your computer waiting for auctions to end. It's been around for quite some time, and I believe it has a decent-sized userbase ... I've never used it, but the existence of such a tool seems to imply that this study's conclusion has been obvious to many for a long time. It's just common sense ... items with more bids tend to gather more attention, whereas items with 0 bids often slip through the cracks. That's why, as a seller, it's often beneficial to start with $0.01 price and do a reserve auction rather than just starting bidding at your reserve price.
More accurately you can get sniped but unless they're willing to pay more than you are you'll still win.
The *REAL* problem with ebay is the sky high fees which make it impossible for buyers to find a "deal" and impossible for sellers to provide one. Seems to me the fee's are in the 9 - 10% range after everything is added up.
Add that -- half the stuff on ebay is counterfit anyways -- and tell me why should anyone care? Ebay is *RIPE* for the taking. If another service opened up and only charged half what ebay does -- it would be an instant success.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Allow the auction owner to specify the amount of "over time" allowed.
I would think that if most sellers had the option, they would set their auction for X days or Y hours after the last bid is placed, whichever is longer. You need a little time for buyers to find your auction and you wouldn't want auctions to end until people stop bidding. I always thought the fixed length auctions were sort've dumb. Then again, I don't sell things on the interweb either.
The whole point of Ebay is that you're supposed to bid the maximum for which you would buy it. If someone bids more, you didn't want it that much anyway!
The story is wrong. The best way to get something is not to bid at the last moment, but to bid the most money. It works for me.
Wow! Physics has really changed since I was in college!
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
WoW that is an *evil* but great solution to the problem of getting things off ebay for at least a decent price! I hate/applaud you. I would like to add that although the math works out there are times when a properly placed bid is sort-0f like marking your e-territory. If your bid is a reasonable price but still a bargain than the only bidders left of people crazy enough to pay to much! 4 used items that come with the *box* WHOA! Still I like sniping I mean some auctions must end cheaply or else just buy the f*ckin' thing **NEW** :) I 3 e-Bay
sense of security, like pockets jingling...
Shave x seconds off the closing time for every bid, as a 'sudden death' rule.
Then, open a betting site to wager on actual end times.
Why am I not in b'i'ness?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
As long as you bid your maximum amount whenever you bid then sniping isn't an issue. The thing is human nature is to not bid the max at first, but to just test the waters and bid the minimum or a bit over it. I think people are thinking they can always bid higher later. (I've seen people who know about sniping do this too, so it's human nature not just newbies to eBay.)
You are correct, in the event of a tie the earliest bid wins. Also the increments can get odd when eBay's automatic bidding decides things, so you can lose by a penny if the other person's max bid is even a penny more than yours. The set increments only matter when placing a bid, you have to bid at least one set increment higher than the current winning bid, but the final winning bid doesn't have to be by a set increment, just higher than any other bids.
I have heard that Idea before, and it seems to be a win win for everyone, why won't ebay chage their model?
Hi, welcome to Human Nature. We tend to not change our methods because it shows that we were originally wrong.
eBay didn't invent auctions. Sniping isn't new. Yet there doesn't seem to be a sniping crisis in the rest of the world's auction industry. Instead of the reporter just asking some economists with a 4 year old paper about the Korean mathematics that the story is about, and getting general economics replies, how about asking an auctioneer how to run auctions so sniping doesn't game the system? What qualifies these reporters to publish, other than a running press and a phonebook? Who takes them seriously?
--
make install -not war
That is a sound argument, but you are not looking at the right problem. On eBay, as everywhere else, people want to pay the lowest price that gets them the goods. I might be willing to pay $20 to get the item, but if I can get it for $10, then without a doubt it's a better deal.
Theoretically the auction mode that eBay uses guarantees that the winning bidder pays the minimum increase above the second highest bid. The winning bidder never pays his own price. He pays the second highest bidder's price + $1. So, if you pay someone else's highest bid, maybe you can influence that bid? That's what sniping does. You influence what the second highest bid is by keeping the price low until the end of the auction. If everybody predetermined their maximum bid, that wouldn't work, but that's not how people bid on eBay. When people join the auction, their bid depends on the current top bid. Some people get carried away and bid more than the item costs in the brick & mortar store around the corner, if they see that otherwise they won't get it. Sniping means that you don't give them that impression until it's too late for them to bid.
Personally, I think that it is more economical to determine what you belive the maximum value of the item is and just set a maximum bid of that amount. Then forget it. If you win, you win, if you don't well some other idiot exceeded what you determined the vallue of the item to be and overpaid as far as you're concerned and the seller got a nice bonus.
Sniping: AFAIAC no bids from someone who has not bid at least 1h before the end of the auction should be allowed, in fact I would go so far as to say anyone who has not placed a bid in the 1st 50% of the run length should be allowed to bid once the 50.00000000000000001% mark has been reached.
Othe problems with sniping: if you snipe against someone such as me who has already determined a max value of the item and has set the max bid to reflect that unless you go very high, you're likely to lose anyways as it DOES take a certain amount of time for bids to be processed, and ebay's time remaining doesn't always seem to be very accurate. As a matter of fact from auctions that I have won, and was interested enough in to see if sniping would occur near the end the time remaining has generall gone from Xm (where 2 X 10) to auction ended. Ebay covers themselves by some verbage re bidding length which IIRC states that time remaining may be fairly inaccurate, or enough to CYA on the above behavior.
BTW: I've never won an auction by sniping, and I have gotten so pissed off a few times, that I DID try... I always win by the above mentioned method, and have NEVER felt that I have overpaid for anything, nor have had any problems etc. with most sellers. In the 8y or so that I have used ebay on and off, I have had only one problem seller and that was recently. (The auction was invalidated by ebay as a result of inaction by the seller, along with some other factors such as the seller being a minor.)
I am amazed that you've been modded flamebait, that's poor even by recent slashdot moderation standards. This a perfectly reasonable point of view, even if one doesn't agree with it, but I guess you've had the bad luck of being moderated by an ebay ripoff merchant.
The first few times I bid for things on ebay, I saw the price ratchet up to well above what the item was worth (in on case, above the brand new price of the item, so that's not just a value judgement on my part). It didn't take me long to decide that bidding early was completely pointless. I decide what I'm willing to pay, and I make my bid close to the end of the auction. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose, but I don't see what's unfair about it. It's a time-limited auction, the highest bid received before the end wins, end of effing story.
Oh no... it's the future.
I need to get some ... uh ... research money. Yes, that's it. Preferably before Wednesday, because that's when my Watched Items are all ending. Gotta buy stuff to research the most effective method to win, right?
That's what I've always thought too. The people who come in and snipe at the last minute always end up paying more than I would have for the item because I set my one bid to what I'm willing to pay and then leave the auction alone. While this means I don't get as many items as the snipers, it also means that I don't end up paying more than retail for an item like far too many ebay users I've seen. Unless you're bidding on an game system on the day it's released or something crazy like that, I'd prefer to wait until a good deal rolls around instead of overpaying for my item just to make sure I get it.
I read the internet for the articles.
it already exists on sites like gunbroker.com. It works fairly well.
I have heard that Idea before, and it seems to be a win win for everyone, why won't ebay chage their model?
From my perspective, I don't like that model because I know how much it will inflate the price of items on eBay. The reason I snipe is because I learned years ago that people get attached to the particular item they're bidding on, and if given the chance will end up ratcheting the price well beyond what it's actually worth because they got caught up in trying to win.
If eBay implemented a system like you describe, I think that while they would make more money from each auction, total use of the system would decline because most people aren't interested in paying high prices.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
"If another service opened up and only charged half what ebay does -- it would be an instant success."
Well what are you waiting for? Find investors and start it, you're gonna be rich!
The easy fix to this is to have bids received within X time units of auction close extend the bidding period by y time units; pick your units and values to taste.
Of course, this is open to abuse in a way a similar system in live auctions is not: bidding could be extended indefinitely. And I have no reason to believe it's particularly difficult to skip out on owed bids with impunity. It would be easier and more effective to move to a closed bidding process. No one finds out if their bid has won until the auction has ended.
On the other hand, this is so obvious that I suspect the system is deliberately set up the way it is. The problem, then, isn't sniping, the problem is perceiving sniping as a problem that eBay wants to solve.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
Perhaps eBay has decided its more profitable to allow sniping. If bidders knew that others would always have a chance to up the value yet again they might be reluctant to bid in the first place. People have to think they are going to win before they'll throw out money.
>> Great in theory, but what about time sensitive items? Ala tickets? I often bid on (and sometimes win) tickets off of ebay, and sometimes I win and get delivery (electronic tix) just hours before an event.
> Allow the auction owner to specify the amount of "over time" allowed.
Or even better from ebay's perspective: charge the seller extra to create an auction in which the time will be extended if somebody bids at the last minute.
A /. user on gunbroker???? Where do you work, so that I might inform (warn) your coworkers?!?!?!?!?
Why go fast when you can go anywhere? O|||||||O
He called people dumbasses, dumbass.
While not as exciting, the simple auction method that I like is: Sealed bid, the high bidder gets the item, but he pays what the next highest bidder bids. Bids remain sealed after the auction, though the winner and the price he paid is announced. In the case of multiple identical items, the winners all pay the amount bid by the highest non-winner.
That is why it is always worth bidding an oddball amount slightly higher than your target bid, like $20.53 instead of $20 even.
If you take out psychology then sniping wouldn't help in the eBay proxy bid system. However, psychology plays a big part in many eBay auctions where people get emotionally involved in winning, no matter the cost.
I have bought thousands of items on eBay (and sold many also, fortunately for more than I spent!) and I can in no uncertain terms sniping is the way to go to win more auctions. When I need a part or item I set up a snipe for a bit more than I think it is worth and frequently pay less than I thought I would. There are no guarantees, though, and I most definitely do not win every auction. Before I learned to snipe (back then I despised snipers) I would bid $20 for a $5 component and usually lose but now when I bid say $7 and usually win. Yeah, this sucks for the sellers, but is made up for by the auctions I lose (frequently there is only the winning bid above mine) where the proxy bid system works as planned and boosts the selling price.
pete.phys
I think they just did this "research" because there were britney spears tickets he wanted.
I remember that some German online auction site used exactly that system - ricardo.de, offerto.de, atrade.de, don't quite remember...
There are two problems with this, I think. One, as a buyer, I want to have a feeling of getting a bargain by jumping in at the last minute and snatching a really cool item at the lowest possible price. eBay in many countries has reserve prices - they are an unfair and IMHO dumb idea that lets sellers start everything at 1 euro (or $1) while not actually selling below the secret reserve sum. It doesn't work in Germany. eBay Germany tried bringing over some ideas from its other local sites and they were met with outrage (for example, at one time, it was impossible to sort auctions by time remaining, in an attempt to discourage people from looking for auctions ending soon and sniping; people hated it and the restriction got reversed).
The second problem is a legal one. I remember eBay getting accused of running auctions without a license, which is not allowed in Germany. They got out of this by arguing that their webiste was not running traditional auctions where bidding stops when no higher offer has been made for some period of time but instead always ends after a predefined interval. This apparently makes a lot of difference in legal terms and allowed eBay to carry on. Now, if they extended the bidding time by 10 minutes after each new bid, they would actually be doing just what a real auctioneer does - and probably get in trouble again, or even shut down.
So, I believe such a change would be hard to do, at least in Germany. And I think that's a good thing. At least for me...
The solution is, let people do what they want.
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
Almost funny, but not so much. As if geeks can't 'handle' or use real guns, or aren't safe in the workplace. I'd think with all the training we're better qualified then most.
- Kal`Goblez
McZackly! I've even sniped the snipers by putting my real max into the autobidder at the front end. If I don't know what my dollar limit is for an item, I should be doing more research, not getting carried away by the excitement of the approaching auction time limit.
..on a BellSouth comercial?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
It sounds like one of the basic assumptions of this article is that the object of ebay is to win. That's an incorrect assumption: the object of eBay is to get what you want at the lowest price you're willing to spend. If you're only willing to spend $25 on an iPod, put in a bid of $25. eBay's proxy bidding will handle the pissant bidders trying to nickel and dime their way up. Eventually one of two things will happen: A) you'll be the high bidder and get the item you want for a price less than or equal to the amount you wanted to pay, or B) someone will outbid you and you won't get the item at the price you want, at which point you can either let it go or re-evaluate the amount you're willing to spend.
People get caught up in the "game" of bidding on eBay which is how you see digital cameras that retail for $299, and sell on Amazon for $240, sell on eBay for $320 -- that's an example I've seen with my own eyes. People are stupid and so sniping is effective.
rooooar
But the problem with this is that you never win the item. If you still just bid the one amount you're willing to pay, but you do it with a snipe, you're much more likely to actually get the auction item. Using a snipe program like jbidwatcher, it's just as easy to snipe as it is not to, so why wouldn't you?
Sniping works only because people don't actually enter the maximum they want to pay like eBay tells them to. The people that enter in a bid $2 higher than the current high bid and plan to up their bid later as needed are the people that are mis-using the system. Not the snipers.
-- dR.fuZZo
The prices for some things on eBay really are amazing. It makes you wonder if some of the people on there aren't aware that there are others places to shop online.
Schrodinger's Bid:
You either won the auction at the moment you placed your bid, or you lost. Until you view the auction results, both are true.
Oh yeah, also, you were bidding on a cat that was possibly gassed to death.
Fermi's Bid:
As long as your result is within an order of magnitude of the highest bid, you win.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
The main point I take away from this article is that its written by physicists. The point is not how many bids you put in to win - but at what price. I seriously doubt that the article would make it into any economics journal. You know, the journals where they actually know something about how auctions work.
Who cares if I make 100 bids in increments of $1 or one bid of $100. The price will be the same. What matters is if the price is lower with single winning bids or with 'bidding wars'.
Then sellers would start ending their auctions during the day when people are are work on their computers. Problem solved.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Yes, total fees are around 9% if you get paid with PayPal and about 6% if you receive a check. eBay is full of whining sellers who have no idea how to run a business and no concept of what it costs to run a B&M store. Just look at how many PowerSellers start their auctions start at $1, $10, $25, $50, $200, or $500.
Bid what you're willing to pay (add a few odd cents) as near the end as you dare. There are two downsides to sniping. First, if you don't bid high enough, you don't have time to rebid (but you should have bid your max in the first place). Second, you occasionally receive hate mail from bidders who think you've somehow cheated.
From eBay's help system:
"Placing a high bid in the closing seconds of an auction-style listing is called "sniping" within the eBay Community. Sniping is part of the eBay experience, and all bids placed before a listing ends are valid - even if they're placed one second before the listing ends."
Why do people buy stuff on ebay? You run the risk of dealing with stolen goods, with substandard goods, with substandard sellers - why run that risk? Because you can get a deal, and as a seller because you can shift stock.
;)
If the auction gets extended by 10 minutes then why would I bid at all and give someone else the chance to outbid me? I'd be better off using the other stock sourcing avenues available to me - since I buy items on ebay to sell elsewhere. As a busy person, I can't spend hours at a time hanging around on ebay trying to bid within 10 minutes - I'm too busy ranting on slashdot
And if I'm selling on ebay, sellers will be more reticent at bidding since they know that if outbid at a late stage they must be logged in, possibly at an inconvenient hour, to enter a bidding war. Remember the concept of sniping is more for convenience than for missing out on an auction - it's also so you don't get carried away and bid more than you can afford, maybe even more than you actually have.
Bring in the 10 minute auction offset rule and ebay reverts from being a useful and usable business to being a game. Silly.
One bid seems to attract more bids and the price starts rising as more people become committed to 'winning' the auction. If you wait until the last minute, often times you are just bidding against no one and get the product for the bottom price. The only downside to the sniping tactic is forgetting to bid especially if you are too lazy to automate.
No, EBay allows you to set a threshold and then submits a bid for you at the lowest possible price that puts you in the lead. Ebay increases your bid for you up to your threshold (give or take). You win if the bidding does not exceed your threshold. Sniping is negated if you know what you want to pay (at most).
If you lose an auction to a sniper it's because they entered a higher maximum bid than you. If you were prepared to pay more then why didn't you enter a higher maximum bid to start with?
The only people who lose out from sniping are those fools who bid incrementally until they have the highest bid. Their failure to grasp how the proxy bidding system works is their own problem.
It's also done on Overstock.com's auctions.
"If you have legs and are flammable, you are never blocking a fire exit." -- Mitch Hedberg
Proxy bidding means; Bid your final bid once, let the proxy (eBay) sort
out the winning bid. If you don't understand this and bid incrementally,
you are in effect artifially raising the equilibrium. Good for the seller
in the short term, good for the proxy's commissions, bad for all bidders.
Sniping circumvents that problem and brings the bidding back to a true
proxy bid.
Saying anything else means you don't understand the idea of PROXY bidding
after all.
Since you commented about the sniper service I thought I would put this comment here.
As a seller on ebay, sniping is a bit annoying because I essentially spend a week with my auctions out there as an ad, hoping to attract enough watchers who actually care so there'll be a brief bidding war in the last minute of that 7-day period. I've sold enough, and do enough research before listing an item, that I'm usually pretty good at estimating what an auction is worth, but some classes of items have considerable variability in sale price which makes it hard to know where I stand.
Interestingly, as a bidder I usually don't bother sniping. It requires that I wastefully schedule my day so I can be around in the last few minutes of an auction for something I want, and it's not worth my time. Instead, I look at the range of sale prices for equivalent items and bid at the low end of the range on all the items currently for sale. Usually things I buy on ebay are things I kind of want sometime soonish, so I don't care if I lose 20 auctions over a 3-week span before winning one. The best case is that I get a lowball auction sometime soon. Worst case is that I get nothing, but that rarely happens. Middle case is that I win several auctions, at which point I pick the best item to keep and resell the others. The usually-higher sale price covers ebay's fees, so the extras I sometimes pick up don't cost me anything.
Mining the data for this type of bidder behavior in order to compare its effectiveness versus sniping would probably be difficult, and I see no evidence in the linked article that the researchers studied it. But from my limited perspective, it seems like a great strategy.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
Or by someone who thought the name calling outweighed the value of the point made. A post can be both interesting or insightful and flamebait/troll, as this one so nicely demonstrated.
[command INSERTWITTYQUIP failed: insufficient wit]
How are the dumbasses supposed to know that they're dumbasses if someone doesn't tell them? It's not like any dumbass would come to the conclusion that he's a dumbass on his own!
(Burn, karma, burn! Karma Inferno!)
I used eBay when I want bargains. Why the hell should I pay retail plus inflated shipping and handling when I can get my next MacBook right from the Apple store?
But because everyone treats eBay as a regular marketplace, it's getting a lot tougher for the bargain hunter. People don't know how to effectively use their max bid price. Or people are content paying retail or over even though the reserve price was very, very nice discount!
Now I snipe using an online sniping service to ensure that I get a bargain. That way I'm *not* increasing the attraction to other potential bidders, and I'm not driving up the price over the amount I want to pay for it -- and notice the subtle difference between "what it's worth" and "what I'm willing to pay in this environment." If we all end up sniping, then we're simply turning eBay into a closed auction (silent auction?) -- you know, the other legitimate type of auction where you put in a sealed bid and whoever wins it wins it. Gosh, I wish there were an auction style for that on eBay!!!
Oh, I used to not snipe, and I would set my maximum price the "proper" way. It usually provoke a bidding war amongst the others, or just plain stupid bidding, such as the moron whose name is in the bid history six times in a row as he increases his maximum until he just beats my bid. This brings up another advantage to sniping...
If I end up beating such moron by $1, then I've overspent what I really *needed* to spend, just as bad as if it were a real shill bid. If the jerk were serious, why the hell did he drive everything up $1 at a time? Granted, I was willing to pay as much, but I didn't HAVE to. Sniping helps alleviate that, too.
--Jim (me)
The original onsale.com used to have a similar feature, only is was one minute, rather than 10 minutes. I think this shorter time limit would help to keep auctions from going on into the wee hours of the morning, but it would keep sniping from happening.
Example: Auction is set to end at 9:00. If I put in a winning bid at 8:59:40, then the auction is extended to 9:00:40. If someone else "snipes" me and puts in a winning bid at 9:00:33, then the auction is extended until 9:01:33. This continues until the time runs out. In general, it should only extend auctions by a few minutes. It would benefit sellers, because items would go for their true worth. (i.e. the maximum amount someone is willing to pay for the item.) There has been more than one occasion where I put in a bid, then reconsidered and put in a higher bid only to find that time has expired and the item sold for less than I would have paid for it.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
"A study by South Korean physicists confirms that people can in fact make money out of stating what is blatantly obvious to everyone"
Like you, I put in my maximum willing bid, and wait to see what happens.
The cost of snipers is that I really don't find out I am outbid until 30 seconds before the auction ends.
From an economic point of view, the sniper wins if he is willing to pay more than my maximum price, and that's OK with me. From a convenience point of view, if I were outbid immediately, I would look at *other* listings sooner, instead of having to wait days for a sniper to finally reveal his ultimate bid. *That's* a pain in the ass, waiting for midnight 3 days from now for the sniper to reveal himself.
Ya know, I'd really like to see that. Snipers who outbid me really are willing to pay more than I am, so they might as well have it. Nonetheless, they piss me off, because it means I have to wait the full length of the auction to be out-bid, preventing me from going off and bidding on some other item.
Isn't a strategy like this good only for winning if winning is the only goal and the item's worth to you is irrelevant? It's almost as if winning auctions is some competitive sport? "Yeah, I'm up to 116 wins versus only 23 losses but I have high hopes for the future when my finger heals."
In some undefineable way, I find that a very sad thing. I'm sure that overall, people that resort to "sniping" are paying far more for whatever they are bidding on than it would normally be worth to them. What a waste of money.
I must be a stick in the mud when it comes to bidding on eBay. Here's my process:
1. I find as many examples of whatever it is I'm searching for and try to discover what the going rate is for them. This may mean searching for "completed" auctions on eBay or even checking things like craigslist or classifieds or any number of places that sell whatever I'm looking for.
2. Once I discover the "fair" price (to me), I determine how much more than that I'm willing to pay. Is it extremely common or very rare? If it's common, then my maximum price is the fair price. Otherwise, I'll go up from there.
3. Once I discover my maximum price, I set that as my bid price on the very first bid.
And that's it. If somebody snipes my price at the end of the auction and I "lose", then what of it? It would have made no difference if they did with a second to go or only two seconds after I made my bid. Over the maximum is over the maximum regardless of when the bid came in. Clearly somebody was willing to pay more than I was.
I guess I don't get the same satisfaction when winning as the snipers, though. Sure, I have the item that I wanted, but I don't have any sense of "beating the other guy"... *sigh*
Do you think eBay's not watching IPs? I bet they'll spot his pattern before too long.
He should use a separate IP address for his chicanery.
But I guess people don't choose a life of deceit due to excessive intelligence, eh?
Yes, but then you get into the other areas of ebay fraud, where the person selling the item has a friend bid. If you don't end up outbidding them, then they are out only the fees, and now they know how far they can push the bid next time. Sniping makes the most sense no matter how you look at it, given the inherent deficiencies of the system.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
But the "max" is just an approximation. I might put down $100 as my max, but if paying $101 means I can get the item over someone else who also put $100 as max, I'll pay the extra $1. That is where sniping come in. As the summary said, i always took sniping for granted. If you really want an ebay item, you almost always have to be there at the very last second of the auction to get that final bid in.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
...if everyone was completely rational and did the same. But they aren't, and generally _don't_ bid their maximum to start with. If someone outbids them, they will reconsider and often up their bid. Sniping doesn't give the other bidders this chance, and avoids irrational bidding wars (as a sibling post pointed out, the best strategy is both to snipe _and_ bid your maximum.)
If you need evidence of this, just take a look at some bidding histories on eBay and see bids being increased between two or more people.
Yeah, the auto-bid can prevent it, but only if the sniper bids too low, and too close to the end of auction to up his bid again. Has happened to me.
I admit I'm a sniper. I bid on ebay in either one of two ways.
Either I set my auto-bid at the maximum amount I think that item is worth and let it go (and if I get sniped, oh well).
Or, I set the auction on watch and then bid the max I want to pay for it within the last 20 seconds or so.
This way I never pay more than what I want, and sometimes get a pretty good deal. I see nothing wrong with it at all. I don't need any special software or tools to win, I just stay attentive and watch my items. Anyone else can outsnipe me at the same time. It's happened several times. I don't get bent out of shape over it. I just look for another one.
Adding a ten minute extension wouldn't really solve this. It would work great for sellers because the emotionally invested bidders would run up their bids more than they otherwise would. The buyers however would be better off just joining the snipers rather than fighting them. If everyone sniped it would basically revert to the pre-sniping days.
But think about a real auction: If the auctioneer says "going once...twice..." the item doesn't just go to the person who threw up their paddle at the last moment. It gets extended for another five seconds or so. Now, maybe the same dynamics don't work in the web world, but at least it puts perspective into it.
What if eBay also had another auction type in addition to normal and Buy It Now ones: silent auctions. It tells you when it ends, the seller may optionally give a reccomended amount, and you get to put in your bid, without knowing what anyone else put down. Now you'd be more compelled to put your maximum bid down.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
A+A+A+AAAAAAA++++++ Great article, would read again.
you get a lot of people who really wan't the item but have set a budget, by bidding early you get theese people caught in the heat of the bidding action and encourage them to bust thier budget.
the result is they overpay for the item and you don't get it at all, the only winner is the seller.
sniping does not encourage this behaviour as by the time they see thier outbid its too late.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
This is absolutely correct. Why would anyone want to show his hand ahead of time? Ebay isn't a real auction, with people bidding in full sight and hearing of each other until the last participant is "left standing." It's an entirely logical approach to conceal from other bidders that you want to participate until the last second, since it lulls others into thinking that there is little interest in the object, encouraging them to make low bids. It also greatly reduces the chance that others will up your bid simply because they don't have time. I realized the first time I bought something on Ebay that this was the only rational approach, and I'm continually astonished that others consider it ungentlemanly.
"maximum"
Maybe that word doesn't mean what you think it does?
Bigtime Consulting - "We're the best because we cost the most"
One other thing to consider is that some people may not feel comfortable putting in their true highest bid when they snipe, if they don't think they need to. So the last time I was in a snipe-war, I did double-sniping, with a reasonable bid at 10 or seconds so left, then my true maximum bid at 5 seconds or so left, already prepared in another browser tab waiting for a click on the "bid" button. I lost the auction, but that was because there were two snipers, one willing to pay way more than my absolute maximum.
At least I had the satisfaction that it didn't sell for less than I would have paid for it.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
But what is that maximum?
If there's an item that you're willing to pay up to $10 for, you would probably still take it for $10.05. If it's one that's worth $10.05, you'd probably still consider it a pretty good deal for $10.10. That's where proxy bidding fails, because in the end, unless you enter a massively overpriced proxy bid, you're just going to be sniped by some other guy by 5 cents.
The question is not how to win - we know the answer to that is to OFFER TOO MUCH MONEY.
I can guarantee a win on any auction in the world - just offer triple the value of the item.
That will work MUCH more often then "sniping" will.
The real question is not 'how to win', but instead "how to get the product at the cheapest price, without spending a lot of time on it".
Sniping has the advantage of not informing other people about how much you will bid, and requires the minimum amount of time per bid (Step 1, get end time. Step 2, enter bid at that second).
But it entails a lot of "underbidding risk" - the chance that someone else entered a max bid higher than what you did.
I can tell you how to get a good price with minimum total time: A) Look for products that is MISSPELLED. Fewer people will find it, so fewer will Bid.
B) Look for products that are NOT being sold by businesses. I.E. No "Buy It Now" crap, no "selling up to 10000". Bussinesses demand a profit, so they will NEVER accept a truly cheap bid.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I'd call it a win-win-lose.
Seller makes more. Ebay makes more. Buyer pays more.
South Korean researchers analyzing eBay in America in between falsifying white papers on cloning? I just decided not to buy the new Huyundai. Their researchers are under too much pressure to come out with outlandish controversial discoveries. I'm going to pay extra and go with a Suby.
>
> Proxy bidding is supposed to allow easy auctions with fairness. The problem is the sniping phenomenon.
> And there is an easy fix: A bid will extend the auction by ~10 minutes if received in the last 10 minutes.
> Voila, no more sniping.
From I've got a great new idea... on the sniper myth debunking website:
Apart from extending the bidding time a number of other proposed solutions to the sniping "problem" are evaluated on that site, along with a debunking of some myths about sniping. A very informative site, imo.
Every buyer with any brains at all figures out sniping is the way to go. I have been a seller for over 5 years, and I make more money on my auctions when I have them end on a Sunday afternoon. More people are home, near their computers, and ready to snipe at that time. I don't ship internationally (too much fraud), so time zones aren't really an issue.
I often get no bids at all up until the last 30 minutes of an auction, when 10 or 20 can suddenly come in.
"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard
Like any of the participants will accept that randomness. Sniping programs will just snipe every damn minute throughout that hour.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
You don't get it. In your example, count the number n of $1 increments you'd be willing to iteratively make to secure the item. Initially bid $100 + n instead of $100.
You want the best strategy to buy something? Offer 10 times the listed value. Or click on the fools choice "Buy it Now". Why don't you do that? Because your desire is not to 'be the moron that bought the item" it is instead to be 'the genius that bought it for LESS than it is worth.' And this study ignored that question.
The study looked at "how to win an auction", but considered "winning" to be getting the item instead of "getting the item for CHEAPER than it would cost to go buy it in a store (don't forget to include the high shipping costs). Anything else is losing the auction game, even though you win the bid.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
If you're willing to do to $101, then why not put that down as your max?
Before you put in your first bid, you should know EXACTLY how much you're willing to pay. And then you NEVER go past that amount. It doesn't matter if it is one cent on a $10,000 item. Max is max. (I didn't come up with this advice. It's from my father and grandfather. Both of whom made their living selling farm equipment, often bought at auction)
If you bid any other way at an auction, then you'll just end up overpaying. If you go to $101, then will you go to $103 when the other guy bids again? And then $105? $107? How long will you keep going "just a little bit higher"? Soon you're at $150 instead of $100. IF that's how high you would go, then you should have gone that far in the first place.
Ummm...which sellers, in which countries, to which buyers working what hours/shifts or even on which side of the international dateline?
Too complicated for this math challanged old hippie!
"Never try to teach a pig to sing. It simply wastes your time and truely annoys the pig"
I agree.
I dunno what the big discovery here is.
Aside from the observation that "a lot of early bidders generally indicates greater interest" which will often drive the price up--I'm not sure what the proof is. If there was only some demonstration I could witness.
Also (by the by) I am auctioning a McDonnell Douglas space-shuttle model right now (item # 220001096447), and everybody keeps choking on the packing & shipping costs.
Only ~4 days left, snipe early and often kids!
~
GunBroker has this "feature"--I haven't seen how it really helps anything.
From Planet Obvious comes this newsflash: waiting to see what others are willing to pay for an item, and *then* deciding whether you are willing to pay more is more efficient than lowballing for days beforehand!
:( -- but that's my own stupid fault, and a chance I willingly took).
Duh!
I don't see how sniping is a "problem" Since e-bay allows you to enter a max bid, but will only raise your bid to the least amount needed to exceed all other max bids, sniping still doesn't guarantee you a win. I've lost a number of auctions--during the last minute--because someone else wanted it more^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hbid more than I did. And sometimes, like an item I just missed yesterday, sniping loses you an auction because when the bid ended, you were away from your computer and missed the chance to bid (*##!!! item went for $12.95, too...I would have paid $35 for it
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
A maximum is a maximum. If you're willing to pay $10.10, then put that in. Surely at some point ($10.50? $11.85? $17.50? $50?) you're going to reach your real maximum. The problem is, sniping probably eliminates "great deals" for buyers, which is good news for sellers. However, I've never lost an auction to sniping. If my max is $10, and I get outbid to $10.05, then $10.05 was too much. I'm not going to put in a max of $6 then check in periodically then gripe when someone snipes it and wins it for $8.50.
If you use the system the way it's supposed to work, you won't lose.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Sniping works because it allows you to play the auction game with the most information possible. At the beginning and middle of an auction, information such as price, demand, number of bidders, and the description of the item, can change and therefore causes uncertainty. For example, lots of sellers, towards the end of an auction, will lower prices if no one bids on it. Other sellers will change the items discription, and add incentives.
I only look at items with less than one day remaining. I find an item with no reserve (or a reserve I know) and a few bidders. Then I place a reasonable bid. This will bring out the rest of the bidders who may or may not bid. It also protects me against bidders/buyers remorse. A half hour before the auction ends, I raise my bid to the maximum I will tolerate.
the reason people snipe (vs. just bidding their personal maximum to start) is fear of being run up by shills. it's a survival mechanism for your money, if such a thing isn't self-contradicting on eBay...
Another reason is the 'tards who drive up an auction price with multiple incremental bids to find out what your maximum proxy bid was. They then retract their last bid and you're stuck paying close to your maximum (unless you're later sniped).
I agree that e-bay should extend auctions by a set time when there is a last-minute bid.
Real programmers use "copy con program.exe"
People will just start sniping in the last seconds of the extra 10 minutes then. And if you propose to add another 10 minutes on, the auction might never end. It would be tough to balance a system like this.
If you're looking for a bargain this way, would that be considered snipe hunting? I've sent so many people on snipe hunts, but I've never had them do it on-line before...this opens all sorts of possibilities.
"The problem is the sniping phenomenon."
Who says this is a problem?
Sniping is the natural result of smart bidders not wanting to pay inflated prices due to emotional bidding wars.
I think the answer is obvious, if you're a seller you want lots of intense bidding wars. If you're a buyer, you want to be the only bidder.
There are lots of non-online auctions that have specific deadlines. I think the complainers are the sellers or those who don't put in their highest bid and then are pissed off that someone outbids them at the last second. If you read the Ebay guidelines, they advise you to enter the HIGHEST price you'll be willing to pay.
And what about shill bidders? Where's the massive outcry from sellers about this problem?
That's the big flaw about ebay bidding, if you want something, bid last 3 seconds, warranty to
win everytime
Doesnt take a genius to figure that out
The reason it's not offered is that eBay is more dependent on bidders than sellers at the end of the day.
Actually automatic auction extensions are patented, and not by them.
I'm not sure, but I'll research that as part of my Roman History class this year.
Are you crazy? Never do for free, what a government grant will pay millions for!
Then $10.00 wasn't really a maximum value was it? The fault would be yours for not bidding $10.05 in the first place. If you bid your absolute maximum amount on every auction, then when you get outbid you won't feel bad for losing the auction.
Works for me - I see something I like, then I bid my max and forget about it. If I get an email later saying that I won the auction, I go back and pay. I turn off those uselsss "you have been outbid" emails.
Sure, but who knows the absolute max they will pay? The whole point of an auction is to compete directly with other bidders to find that maximum.
Yeah, that is what real actions are.... really inefficient sniping. There is nothing wrong with it, per se. The problem is that eBay does not provide a proper mechanism for "really inefficient sniping." It comes down to timing with your web browser.
It woudl totally solve it. The whole point of an auction to give emotionally invested bidders a place to run up bids. Otherwise it isn't really an auction.
But joining hte snipers to fight them.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
I started on eBay back when it was still new and I was still a minor.
There are some big advantages to sniping. One is that, as the number of bids goes up (this is not the same as number of bidders as each bid counts seperately), so does an item's desireability. Simply put, people tend to want what other people want. By waiting until the last few seconds, it would appear that there is one less person intersted. One person might not seem a big difference, but in terms of bid count, it can make a huge differece.
Another advantage is that if someone wants something and is outbid, that person may get in the mindset of, "Well, it's just a few more dollars." Have multiple bidders in this mindset and the price goes up. Or it may give a bidder a chance to save up more money of it's not just a few dollars, or find a way to get the money. Saving a bid prevents other bidders from having a chance to up bids, or from having time to find another way to get more money.
One advantage I see as important is that, if you use a sniping program, you put in your bid and that's that. There's no time to up your bid if it isn't high enough, which only results in you bidding more than you would have thinking maybe just another dollar, another five, maybe one more.
It's a girl!
... mathematicians prove 1+2=3
But as far as the sniper is concerned, she's doing exactly what you're saying: she's finding out immediately if she won or not. Further, when you bid early, you tie your options to the success or failure of that bid and you have to wait until you win or lose before your option expires and you can move on. If you don't bid until the last second, you're not tied up and can move on immediately, even before the auction is over if the opportunity presents itself.
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Bid an crazy amount on something no one wants.
A resin Papa Smurf garden gnome.
or Barry Manilow vinyl LPs
I used to work for a on-line auction company (not eBay, a "Business to Consumer" one). We did implement this logic,
where the auction would extend 10 minutes after the last bid. Most of the profit on items came during this "extended"
period of time, and the bidding could get quite furious.
From a technology view-point, this made the closing auction logic complicated (which then affects category pages and
search results).
From eBay's perspective they've already captured the listing fee, and the 10-20% movement in price achieved by
extending the auction nets them (eBay) only a few more pennies on their percentage of selling price, so why
would they bother? It's the same tension as real-estate agents - they'd rather get a $100,000 sale 10 days into
a home's listing than a $120,000 sale 60 days in e.g. a $5000 (assuming 5% commission) at 10 days than $6000
at 60 days. Can you blame them?
-Slak
To buy stuff cheap.
I hate bidding wars and do not participate. I either enter my max from the start and ignore it until it's over, or I snipe it at the end, all the while laughing at the people who were consistently outbidding each other for the last 3 hours in $1 increments. What a waste of time and effort.
Trying to bid for an item the other day, I made a few tentative bids during the last 5 minutes and someone was manually bidding slightly higher every time so I held back a 'confirm your bid' page for my maximum amount and submitted it 10 seconds before the auction ended. Guess what - a lovely ebay message that 'an error has occurred' and by the time I had gone back to the item page and re-keyed the bid the auction had ended. I queried this with ebay and got a multi-page 'cut-and-paste' job that basically told me 'like we care'.
AT&ROFLMAO
First of all, no, you will not be sniped by 5 cents. That would require that the sniper knows your maximum bid. He doesn't know your maximum bid, because he doesn't bid until the end of the auction. Your maximum bid is as hidden as his, so the sniper will almost always outbid you by the minimum increase.
What you describe is the reason why sniping works. People have a problem with the word "maximum". If $10 is the maximum amount that you're willing to pay, it means that you are not willing to pay 5 cents more. Otherwise $10 wasn't the maximum. Ebay auctions are set up in a way that doesn't make you pay your highest bid. Instead it makes you pay what the second highest bidder was willing to pay plus the minimum increase. Every single auction on ebay ends with someone not getting the item because someone else snagged it for just one dollar more. There is a limit where you wouldn't increase your bid by even one dollar. That is your maximum bid. More here.
The only flaw in your strategy is that it requires the buyer to be willing to also become a seller. Many times, this is not the case. For example, I've only purchased a few items via ebay over the years. I've sniped most of those auctions because they were things that I would like to have but weren't so critical that I would care if I lost, while at the same time I wasn't so invested that I wanted to bid on tens of different auctions. If I win, I get what I wanted. If I lose, I don't. Most importantly, I don't run the risk of winning multiple auctions, having to pay for that merchandise, and then try to flip it. Since I rarely use ebay, it should be obvious that I have low reputation (what I do have is good, but there's not much there) which can hurt sellers. I don't want to spend my time listing the auction and hoping I can sell the item for enough over what I paid that I can at least break even.
For casual users like myself, sniping is the only way to go. Your method requires too much investment, and "normal" bidding will result in bidding wars that could end up costing way more than the item is worth. Sniping from a position where you don't care if you lose Just Works (tm).
In relation to eBay it means "an approximation of the highest amount you are willing to pay."
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
You can only snipe once, otherwise your just bidding over and over.
...This and other stories can be found in this month's issue of Duh magazine.
There's no point in bidding a "reasonable" amount. You should always bid for the win, using the absolute maximum you're willing to pay for the item. Then you can hope you get a bargain. Instead, if you bid for a bargain and hope for a win, you'll lose more often than not.
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
But if you are a sniper on eBay, $101 is as much as you will spend because there is no time to bid more even if you wanted to. I've done it several times. If eBay were actually like real auctions, your advice would be spot on. But the reality is that eBay auctions are not like real auctions. You CAN get a $100 item for $101 without risking going from up to $150 by sniping.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
"Then sellers would start ending their auctions during the day when people are are work on their computers. Problem solved."
I hate to point this out, but aren't many of us right now (myself included) browsing the Internet from work?
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
Guess what fucktard, life is not fair. If you win you win. If you lose you lose. Insdtead of bitching about it, why not do some sniping yourself? All auctions, including ebay, it is a dog-eat-dog world where only the fittest survives.
The problem with the "bid the maximum you will pay" line of thought is that it assume there is a hard maximum you are willing to pay. In reality "the maxmimum you are willing to pay" is a fuzzy line. It's the same problem with the pile of pennies. If someone is poor, adding a penny won't make someone rich... but eventually they will have a pile of a 100 trillion pennies. Likewise, if an auction end price isn't too much for me, adding 5 cents to it wouldn't make is too much either. But at some point it WILL be too much. There just isn't some hard line (i.e. a maximum price) that makes it too much. This is not to say Ebay needs to control sniping. I don't think they do.
Ebay is a system composed of matter and energy. It's behavior is therefore open to study by physicists. Let's just hope they don't have a bunch of "Dark Money" in a PayPal account somewhere.
Autonomous Retard -- Is your camp safe? UnsafeCamp.com
This will statistically favor the users who's auctions end more toward the end of the hour. Many people watch the last few minutes of auctions they are bidding on just in case they decide they want to bid more. If they go to watch the end of the auction at 10:00 and end up sitting there for 30 minutes, there is more time for people to outbid each other than if it ends in 2 minutes.
nothing
Oh man...
The thing is, even if one bids the absolute maximum one can pay, 10 cents more is still just 10 cents more.
Unless you happened to bid your entire economy on an item, you'll always be able to afford 10 cents more with no problem whatsoever.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Why would I do that when i could sit back and wait for others to get the bids up to a reasonable level, and then snipe at the very last second with a bid of +$1? I used it do it the way you suggest and I would lose auctions all the time. Then i figured out that, on eBay, the only part of an auction that really matters is that last minute. Everything else is just a waste of time and unnecessarily raised the highest bid. If there are only a couple people bidding, you can easily *save* money by sniping. It works.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Nope, in relation to eBay it means "the highest amount you are willing to pay." Ebay auctions are second-price auctions (approximately, you pay the minimum increase above the second highest bid). That is a good approximation of market value: In a market where the seller tries to sell for the highest amount he can get and buyers try to buy at the lowest price they can get the goods for, the person willing to pay the most pays slightly more than second highest price. For prices above that point, there is no buyer competition, so the seller can not realize prices significantly above the "second price". The highest bidder isn't going to pay more than he has to just because the item is worth a certain amount to him. So, in an Ebay auction, your maximum bid should really be the maximum that you're willing to pay. The auction style takes care of the rest.
The reason why the time when you place that bid does make a difference is that many people don't understand the ideas presented above. Specifically, there are many people who apparently don't try to pay the lowest price that they can get an item for. Sniping gives an advantage if, and only if, there are non-rational people among the bidders, i.e. always.
A bid will extend the auction by ~10 minutes if received in the last 10 minutes. Voila, no more sniping.
That's good, but I think that an even better idea would be to not reveal any bids until the bidding is over. In the case of tie max bids, the first bid submitted wins.
However, ebay will not do this (and I imagine that the sellers don't want them to) because being able to see a low bid gives a person hope and makes them bid on something they wouldn't otherwise bid on. When you log onto ebay and see that Spiderman #1 comic and the current bid is $3.50 then you think to yourself, "holy crap! I'd pay $100 for that!" and you bid - and you get sniped at $101. But if the bids were all a secret, then you might think to yourself, "that's going to sell for $500 easy, I'm out" and then maybe it would actually go for $3.50.
That's my thinking anyway.
Are you an emotionless blob of matter? Do you never think "Just one $ more, maybe I get it."?
eBay is nor for rational buyers, it's for the gambler-type of buyers.
The reason that sniping is the best strategy is because an auction is a competition. One way to help win a competition is to reduce the number competitors. On eBay that means not indicating your interest in an item until the very last seconds of the auction.
In a confusing environment like eBay, many people look for validation of their decisions. One way to validate their uncertain decision is by bidding on something that someone else is bidding on. It makes some people feel good that there is someone else that made the same choice as they did. If you multiply this out, you end up with auctions having 20+ bidders (the madness of crowds). That's a lot of competition. The chances of winning against that many bidders is poor.
If you want to have less competition, and thus win, do not indicate your interest in an item until you have to.
Unless you happened to bid your entire economy on an item, ...
Why, when I read that line, did I think: "Kind of like how the US has bid its entire economy on crude oil?"
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
Automate sniping works for me. Snip.pl service allow you to snip auctions in the last seconds using your predefined values. There are tons of other options too ("do not bid this item if that item was won" etc.) However it is free (as in beer) only for first ten shots, than you have to pay. Do you know similar services, but free of charge?
This Is Not a Sig
I sell a fair amount of stuff on eBay, buy nearly as much. I would pay extra to list items with an option to allow bidding to continue as long as people were bidding on the item. I would also be more likely to bid on items with that option. An auction should be about how much the marketplace wants to pay for an item, not about who has the fastest sniping software.
Cue the inevitable "you don't understand!!!" responses. Yes, I do. You snipe because you want to get in as low of a bid as possible, and deny me the chance to counter your lowball offer.
Extending the auction when someone bids has probably been patented by someone ;-)
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
I have a hard time understanding what type of person you max-is-max-people are. Don't you have any hunting mentality?
6 07538 and no, I'm not that poster.
If an item I originally intended to get for max $10 sold for $10.05 I'd be _pissed_! Of course I would have paid that more. My maximum is dynamic, taking into account the max of other people. How do you determine your own maximum anyway if you never look at what other people do?
I'm really puzzled that you can do this max-is-max business and stick with it so rigorous.
Excellent post about this: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=189567&cid=15
Wrong.
If I believe an item is worth at most $120, and I bid $120 early, then the best you can hope for with sniping is $121... more than it's worth... you win the auction but, sorry pal, you've paid too much. And you'd have done just as well bidding $121 anytime earlier.
Great strategy... if you don't actually want to buy anything on ebay.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Yes, if I were willing to keep my computer online and/or orient my life around eBay auction ending times (which seem to always be something like 2 a.m. Saturday night), as opposed to browsing eBay and leaving bids when I have the time and inclination.
What about people that want to sell an item by a certain time? Theoretically, this could extend the bidding indefinitely. I understand that it would mean they are making more money, but sometimes you just want it to END.
Surviving America
they are an unfair and IMHO dumb idea
I don't get that. Really. It says "Reserve not met" in large and friendly letters all over the place, and I am under the impression that those who dislike reserve price auctions must have some attention deficits. Actually, the "buy it now" option only really makes sense with a reserve price, as it will disappear with the very first bid on ebay.de. Reserve price auctions are a good tool for sellers to find out what the market is actually willing to pay for a given item, while not risking having to sell below the seller's preceived value of the item. This is really important for items that are rarely offered on ebay, and only have a small target audience.
Even if they did this within a random 5-minute ending period it would significantly reduce sniping.
If you were willing to pay $10.10. then the $10.00 was not the highest you wanted to pay for it in the first place.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
What if eBay also had another auction type in addition to normal and Buy It Now ones: silent auctions. It tells you when it ends, the seller may optionally give a reccomended amount, and you get to put in your bid, without knowing what anyone else put down. Now you'd be more compelled to put your maximum bid down.
You know, that really is how ebay should work. Would totally get rid of sniping for good.
The only real way to win is not to bid at all.
Just to follow up on your real auction points, I'd note that (from a significant amount of TV here in the UK) that there are a few analogues between ebay and real auctions.
What typically happens for a desirable item is that a number of bidders (maybe only 1) place their bets (on whats called commission) before the auction starts - these are like the normal ebayers. The snipers are similar to the people in the sale room on the day - they keep raising their bets incrementally trying to knock the highest commission bidder out of the sale, as well as trying to outbid other buyers. Its probably only a matter of the timescales involved that makes sniping such a pain, along with the fixed auction length.
It isn't that simple. You assume that everyone else is going to put in their absolute max right from the start. That doesn't happen. Many people are going to try to get an item for less than it is worth to me (or them). So I let them think they are going to get it for a steal and then swoop in and take it for *less* than if I had put in my abs. max bid from teh start. This is especially effective if the item is used and there is no commonly accepted value for an item.
And even if I don't save money, i'd rather have an item for $121 than not have it at $120. I realize that this would be a bad strategy in a real auction, but eBay isn't a real auction.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
I'm in complete agreement. I don't understand why it doesn't work this way already.
Constitutionally Correct
Both are *half* true. Remember to normalize your eigenstates!
Forward auction is not as efficient as a reverse auction. Ebay is an example of a forward auction. Toolow is an example of a reverse auction.
Forward auction requires buyers to bid up in the price of a good. Reverse auction induces the sellers to bid down the price for the business of a buyer. The sharp contrast behind a forward auction and a reverse auction is the speed in which the auction can be completed. The economy is demand driven, thus the argument is that if there's no buyers, sellers can't sell. An efficient economy requires demand and supply meet at the equilibrium point. With a forward auction, supply is blinded by how much to produce. This caused production of goods to be more or less than the market demand. With a reverse auction, the demand is known for supply to better assess how much to produce at what time. Reverse auction helps drive the just-in-time model more closely.
Or, as another has said, implement "silent bidding". You get to bid once on an auction, and you don't know who won until that auction is over. This may hurt people who are trying to follow multiple auctions for identical items, but too bad.
Being able to retract a "last" bid while maintaining all the non-winning bids ought to disqualify all bids by that person on that auction. Running up the price? That's evil.
Constitutionally Correct
As a buyer, I hate sniping because I have two options:
1. Don't snipe, and feel like a sucker for not playing the game correctly.
2. Snipe, but have to adjust my schedule to be on eBay at an exact time, and risk forgetting about it and losing my chance to bid.
What I'd like is:
3. To enter my bid early but schedule it to be actually placed 2 seconds before the auction ends.
If the buyers really are the most important part of eBay, then they should add this option.
Sniping may net you a win but not the lowest price.
If the item up for auction is a rare collector's item
and you are a collector and MUST have the item, then
snipe you must.
But if the item is readily available elsewhere and you
are just looking for a bargin, then just place a bid
for the highest price that you are willing to pay and
walk away.
Sure you'll win it. If you decide you want to pay $20 and bid $20 early on, your bid has priority over someone else who bids $20 or less later. If someone else wins the item, they will have paid more than you were willing to pay anyway, so you wouldn't have wanted the item. So your point is what, exactly? It does not have any bearing on the strategy being discussed. It's in your best interest to bid sooner if you know exactly what your upper limit is.
i am a soviet space shuttle
I've been thinking of adding something to my auctions saying "$2 discount if you bid before the last hour". Hence effectively implementing a "sniper fee" to discourage snipers--the idea being that by encouraging early bidders, you effectively raise the visible value of the item. Has anyone tried this?
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I see nothing wrong with sniping. If you have set your bid to the absolute maximum you are willing to pay, and not a cent more...if no one snipes it at that $$ amount...you will still win. If someone outbids your bid at the last second...well, in your mind you should say.."They paid too much for that..."
Well, say something comes up for sale on a 9 day auction. I want it, so I bid $100 on it. I think it may be worth $110, but I would rather have it for $100. My bid, at $100, is the highest bid for the whole auction. I refresh the last 30 seconds - still the winning bidder. Then, someone comes in and bids something higher, taking the bid from me at $100.05. They didn't "play fair" in that there is no way anyone could have outbid them - time ran out. Also, it is as if they personally stole it from me. They didn't do what you said I should do, so they didn't play fair. And even if I won the item, my $100 bid may have been costing me only $50 with those 30 seconds left, then they bid $80 or even $100, and so I still won it, but they made me pay more - making me lose money I wouldn't have lost if they didn't snipe.
Sniping hurts the bidders. I don't like eBay because I get sniped all the time. My cure for sniping? Buy the item elsewhere. Too bad others don't walk when they know they are treated poorly. The fairest way for the bidders is to extend the end when there are bids - just like real life. That will make the sellers more money, so they won't complain. eBay won't do it, so I don't buy there. Let me know if they ever listen to their customers and I'll consider coming back.
Learn to love Alaska
In the big supply-demand chain, if you are bidding on high demand / low supply items then you'll get raked across the coals with last-minute sniping. But if you want tickets to tonight's Aerosmith, then that's what you're facing.
I'm into Magic cards (i.e. collectibles), where the bidding is often very different. For the most part e-bay doesn't have oodles of truly unique collectibles, just a few. If I'm looking for specific batch of Magic cards, I just set e-bay to e-mail me every couple of days when new auctions come up. When I find an auction I place my max bid and then I forget it. There's enough throughput on e-bay that I can just bid on the next one.
With a 50% variation on some similar auctions and various ending times (to foil snipers?), I don't have to watch over my bid. If I'm not getting my item for $X then I can raise my future bids or just keep trying. Again, these items are always coming up for auction, so this is ideal for the set it and leave it approach. Every once in a while, you'll even get a dead fish, where you're the only "real" bidder and you hit that 50% cheaper mark. I've bottom-fed a good part of my collection in this fashion.
In this case, the snipers just get their cards earlier (in exchange for paying more). And I stand the best chances of getting my goods for the price I'm willing to pay.
That is called a Vickrey auction. It has some theoretical advantages but for various reasons never caught quite on.
(has some theoretical diasadvantages as well, such as the possibility of stable bidder cartels iirc)
Obviously, the winner is the one with the last bid: that's how auctions work. You don't go back and bid a lower value!
You do realize that many many people use eBay to buy things which are not available from their original manufacturer, or as a "first sale" in any market, right?
Did you read the last paragraph of my comment? Anyway, sniper or not, you should never bid more than the maximum amount you're willing to pay. Doing that might win you the auction, but in all cases where you would have lost the auction with your real maximum, you're going to pay more than you want to pay. I don't think I can explain the stupidity of bidding more than your personal maximum any better than that. It feels like a Duh! situation but apparently the obviousness eludes some people.
Similarly the actual time of the auction end can be in a "cloud". For example, it could end any time in a 30 minute window, could be in 3 seconds, 3 minutes or 30 minutes, who knows! Exciting too!
If you're willing to do to $101, then why not put that down as your max?
Before you put in your first bid, you should know EXACTLY how much you're willing to pay. And then you NEVER go past that amount.
But then you lose the ability to gauge the market.
Let's say, for example, that there is some old game on eBay that I want to buy. I really want it, and I'd personally pay $500 for one to get my hands on it. But, from the eBay past auction history, I see that they usually sell for about $100. Now I don't know about you, but if I know something usually goes for about $100, I'd rather pay about $100 and use the extra $400 on something else. (See that? I would pay up to $500, if that was what they sold for. But, since they don't, I'd prefer to pay less.) I would hate to be the person who won one for $475 when the ones the week before and the week after went for $100.
So I put my early bid in at the average selling price, about $100. If I see the price go up to $101 and it's less than a few hours before it ends, I might bump it up to $110. That's still well below my maximum, but it's reasonable to me. If it goes up to $115, I might bump it up to $120. Or, maybe by then another one is listed, and I'll move to it. Or, I'll see that I'm bidding against 5-6 others, and so I'll pass this one up and wait for the demand to die down. I can't do any of those things if I start out with a bid of $150 - maybe I'd lose it, or maybe I'd pay $149 when five more were listed during the week - oversupplying the demand - at $100 each.
What you suggest - bidding the absolute bank-breaking max that I might theoretically be willing to pay - would only work if A) people couldn't get friends to bump up their own auctions, and B) eBay let me, at any time, adjust downward the proxy margin I had previously placed on an item, so that I could adjust for market changes, without any penalty like those associated with withdrawing bids.
(Why don't I just snipe? I rarely remember to go back and check the items at the exact time of closing.)
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Maximum is probably just above what you're comfortable paying. So if your "maximum" is 10, and you think "I wouldn't quite be comfortable paying 12 for this", bid 12.
The chances of it going right up to 12 and stopping are pretty unlikely. If you get it for less, you'll feel good about yourself. If you lose by 10 cents, then you're happy you didn't end up paying 12, since you weren't comfortable with that anyway. If you get it dead on 12, then it's a small loss - but it's the least-likely result. There's generally a narrow range between "worth it" and "uncomfortable paying this".
I'd rather have my max picked out ahead of time than bother with sniping. It's not a game, it's not hunting - it's a purchase.
Last post!
if you "think it may be worth $110", you bid $110. problem solved.
What's that supposed to mean?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
The reason sniping works is people get totally out of control in the last minutes and bid like crazy. Not only have you bought something, but you "win" the auction, so it's a double positive. I have lost more than one auction only to check a big-box retailer's website and see the item for much less than it finally was "won" for.
Regarding eBay sniping...
LAST POST!!!
What do you mean, someone posted after me?
Damn.
Hmmm...
Can you blame them?
In regards to real estate agents? Yes I can blame them. You're paying them to get you the best value for your house, not to get them the best value. That's why you should never hire a real estate agent on a percentage commission, and you shouldn't let them talk you into lowering your asking price by tens of thousands of dollars simply to speed things along.
If they're not getting a percentage, the incentive becomes being able to get other clients at all (you're not going to recommend the agent to anybody if they do a poor job), rather than the incentive being only a little bit more money.
Bingo. I'm flabbergasted this took a whole study. My wife (who I admit is a pretty bright bulb) figured out the winning technique after a couple losing efforts. Put in your best bid right at the end and be done with it.
That basically is sniping, minus the bidding close to time limit.
People that complain about sniping need to RTFM: proxy bidding does the bidding for you by putting in a higher bid than a competing bid at the minimum increment up to the maximum you specified you were willing to pay. If you got sniped, it's because someone bid higher than what you specified you were willing to pay. If you didn't specify the correct amount you were willing to pay and got outbid, that's your lapse in judgement or indecisiveness. It really isn't rocket science. When you put in a bid, put the maximum you'd ever pay for the item. If you got outbid, you didn't want it that bad. If you really did want it that bad, you should have said so to begin with.
The spammers are the most important part of eBay. You've got to figure they generate a really high percentage of the listings fee revenue.
I've come to the realization long ago (after playing the sniping game and using sniping software) that the only items worth buying on eBay are the ones that nobody else wants, that are misspelled so badly that nobody else can bid on them, or the ones that people are unwilling to ship, but are close enough to where you live to be easily picked up. Everything else gets bid up well past it's actual value.
Robert Weber of Northwestern University has written about this extensively. The solution is the 2nd-price auction. In this system, everyone puts in one bid which is the maximum they would be willing to pay. The highest bidder gets the item, but pays what the _2nd_ highest bidder bid. That way there is no incentive to try to outguess your opponents' strategies or "snipe".
The concept is hard to explain, though, so it doesn't get used much.
sPh
Umm that wouldn't work. I say this because once someone bids before 10mins if it extends it 10mins than another person who bids in the extended time is going to do it with under 10mins to go. So it would be an endless cycle until someone just gave up.
Every buyer with any brains at all figures out sniping is the way to go
No. Any buyer with brains will determine an accurate value for an item, set his max bid appropriately, and let the proxy do his work him, and never re-bid higher than his maximum. If you get into the "I have to win this item no matter what" game, you will end up spending more money and overpaying and doing exactly what eBay wants you to do. It's a sucker's game.
Sniping only works if everyone else is sniping. If I set my max bid to $20 and that is the most I feel the item is worth, it doesn't matter how many snipers there are. If they want to snipe higher than $20 then I wasn't going to win the item anyway. And all the sniping in the world isn't going to get them the item if they snipe lower than $20. There is a huge difference between trying to "win" the item, and simply "buying" the item. Really smart buyers do not get emotionally attached to the auction, and let the proxy do all the work.
Maybe it is a serious problem, maybe not, it depends on how you look at it. I've always sort of thought of e-bay as a sealed-bid auction (a well-understood and respected auction practice where each bidder sends in a bid by some deadline, and after that deadline, all the bids are opened and the highest takes the item (or the lowest provides the service)).
In my opinion this is a fairer and saner system because it keeps people from chasing a contract down to the point where they'd lose money, or chasing an item to the point where they can't afford it by throwing in bid after bid in the heat of the moment.
Since everybody who actually wants to win an ebay item snipes, it ends up being pretty close to a sealed bid auction after all. This is okay, although ebay could either do better explaining it to end users, or just outright implement a sealed-bid interface and be done with it.
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
Basically you are just a loser. No one is stealing from you, they simply said they were willing to pay more, which the seller like. The sellers are the ones eBay wants to please. Please continue to stay away.
By bidding too high, too early, you push the price higher than it needs to be. Sniping is a better strategy.
society and a general lack of rational behavior that seems to be associated with it.
There are several different forces at work here--
Among buyers, you have
1. Impulse buyers: Those folks bid an item up at the last minute because they've decided that they "have to" have the item.
2. "Thrill-of-the-chase"ers: These people bid more than they might otherwise, because "the win" has value to them.
3. Rational snipers: folks who wait until the last minute to bid high to avoid competing with #1 or #2.
If everyone behaved rationally, sniping would be neither necessary or rewarded. But when you have about 90% of the eBay buying population behaving in a completely irrational fashion, there are cases when sniping makes sense. As long as what you bid in your "snipe" is a planned amount and as long as that amount is less than or equal to what you're willing to pay (and by definition it is) then sniping can work.
Possibly there's something eBay could do to make this less true. However, I believe that in most cases the buyers in category 1 and 2 (who are probably the majority of eBay buyers) run up prices, which actually brings eBay more money. So they have a disincentive to "fix" this.
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"I don't ship internationally", come on! I'll never be able to buy something from you! Why don't you have a more flexible way, like a minimun number of stars, or only allow paypal as payment?
Please, think in the other 95% of the world.
Jose
If you're talking about participating in a single auction at a time, then I agree with your assessment of bidders who don't bid their limit from the start. It's not so cut-and-dried when multiple concurrent auctions are in progress. If there are currently five running auctions that interest me and I have $100 to spend, then bidding, say, $10 on each and holding the other $50 in reserve so I can increase my bids where needed seems a much more rational strategy than laying out the full $100 in a single wave of initial bids and hoping for the best.
You should consider using http://www.esnipe.com/, which has a feature called "bid groups" that lets you bid on multiple eBay auctions at once, but you will only ever win one of them.
then, what you are effectively saying is that ebay might as well become a "sealed bid" auction, where the bids aren't posted and you don't know whether you won or lost until the end... the alternative is where the bidding continues until all but one has dropped out. Seems to me that ebay offers the worst of both worlds.
If you thought it was worth $110, why'd you only bid $100? It sounds like you (and everyone else bitching about sniping) are trying to run the auction manually, meaning you wait until you're outbid, and then bid again. That's not how Ebay is designed to work. You put in the maximum you'd possibly be willing to pay, and they'll give you the lowest price they can while still making sure you outbid everyone else. A guy who snipes the price up to $80 is absolutely no difference from someone who bids it up to $80 with days left in the auction. They're willing to pay that much, so you have to pay more to win the auction. Jesus christ, it's not that complex of a concept.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
What the heck is a physicist doing studying eBay?
Sniping only works if everyone else is sniping.
Au contraire. Regarding the final price, sniping only works if there are non-rational bidders. Rational bidders bid once and put in their (current) true maximum bid. Intelligent rational people do so at the last minute. If there are only rational bidders, sniping still provides a small advantage because you don't commit to an auction and can always switch to a different auction. But if there are also irrational bidders, the type of people who think that the maximum is a number that can be increased if necessary, then sniping also likely results in a lower price. Since the behaviour of these people depends on the other bids, not putting in your bid until right before the end means that you don't contribute to the amount that they're willing to pay. Since Ebay auctions are second-price auctions, their price is the price you're going to pay (unless another rational person outbids them), and every dollar that they bid lower is a dollar you save if you win the auction.
I still don't understand why people think they've "stolen" or "won" something cleverly by using "sniping" tactics. They've simply placed a bid that was more than the highest bid I was prepared to make. I've never done it and I've never understood why others do it. If you're really willing to spend more than I am, just set your maximum bid there and let it work out on its own. People don't seem to "get" the whole proxy bidding concept, IMO.
Though small bid increments certainly make it a little more difficult to find your maximum bid. You can say "$50, tops", but then someone wins it with a maximum bid of $50.01, and you feel stupid. That shouldn't happen, but the fix to that is using larger bid increments. You shouldn't have to strategize in a proxy bidding process.
For many regular users of ebay, the purpose of ebay auctions is not to maximize economic profit on one single auction. The purpose is to maximize total economic profit across many dozens of auctions conducted over a long period of time. When you are a repeat participant, it can make sense to adopt a strategy which often leaves money on the table, as long as the same strategy has a small probability of winning a lot of money.
The effectiveness of sniping cannot be explained in purely economic terms; one needs a smattering of game theory. In pure economic terms, your strategy of always bidding your maximum leads to minimal risk: either you win the auction and pay less than your maximum, thus profiting the difference, or you lose the auction and do nothing. Obviously, under your strategy, you would always prefer to win the auction, since this is the only scenario that leads to profit. The problem with this strategy is that you are less likely to win the auction if you place your bid first, because
- Information is asymmetric: by revealing your bid first, you give other participants more information, and more information always helps their strategy (yes I realize eBay hides your true maximum, but nevertheless your bid leaks information -- if nothing else it leaks the information that you are participating);
- Other participants are irrational: The presence of your bid actually causes other people to bid higher than they otherwise would, for various unfathomable reasons which have no grounding in logic.
Because the impact of these problems (especially 2) is somewhat unpredictable and random, the bidding process resembles a type of prisoners dilemma, in which per-instance profit-maximizing play is often not long-term optimal. What makes eBay profitable for repeat buyers is the prospect of winning a small number of auctions at prices far far below the true worth of the items. The sniping strategy is the only way in practice to win an auction at a price dramatically below the true worth of the item, because if you bid your maximum at the outset then the other participants will respond (irrationally) in a manner that raises the winning price. In fact, ironically, the information asymmetry problem exacerbates the irrational bid-raising problem under the eBay auction model, since under this auction model one's true maximum represents a crucial piece of hidden information, and the only way to find out this information is to place bids yourself until you exceed someone else's maximum.For a repeat participant, it is rational and profitable to take the risk of losing (say) 10 auctions each at a price within $10 under the true worth of the item, in order to have a 1 in 10 chance of winning one of those auctions at a price $100 less than true value. Unless eBay changes their auction rules, sniping is and will remain the best way to maximize expected earnings across a large number of auctions.
If all of this doesn't convince you, then maybe the information asymmetry argument alluded to above will convince you. Since placing a bid reveals information to the other participants, you are always better off placing your bid as late as possible in order to minimize the information available to competing bidders. Doing so certainly never hurts you (if we ignore for the moment eBay's tiebreaker rules, whose effects are negligible, since the costs imposed by bidding second are less than the transaction costs of the sale), and it can sometimes help you if the other participants are irrational, which they are.
Ok, let's say I feel like paying $20 and bid $20 early. Then some newbie retard (ebay is full of them) comes and says, "Hmm, that guy thinks it's worth $20, so I'll pay $25". Ok, I've now just lost the item. Alternatively, nobody bids on it and newbie retard says, "I dunno, I guess I'll bid $10, since maybe I'll get it real cheap". At the last second I can then come along and snipe my $20, and win the item. Same $20 top bid, but I lose on the first auction and win on the second.
I haven't used eBay, but I have sometimes used a national (EU country) online auction service (that you can use for FREE; imagine that). The auction ends at a predefined time, or five minutes after the latest bid, whichever is later. The same "sniping" happens there as well (meaning a rush of bids during the last 5-10 minutes before when the auction at the earliest would end), but at least every bidder has at least five minutes to react to other bidders and decide if s/he wants to bid more than previously.
It also allows you to auto-raise your bid--you enter how much money you are willing to bid at the most, and the system raises your bid accordingly in case someone bids more than you (up to the amount you specified). Finally, it allows the seller to set a) a price that he hopes to get for the item, at which point he MUST sell the item and any winning bidder similarly MUST buy the item (if no-one bids that much, it is suggested that the seller contacts the highest bidder and attempts to work something out, but neither seller nor bidder is REQUIRED to sell/buy the item), b) a starting price corresponding to what the seller expects in order to at all consider actually selling the item, and c) the minimum amount a bid can be raised by, typically one Euro (meaning a bidder usually cannot raise a bid by 0.05 or some similar token amount). Sellers and buyers can also give feedback about each other on how smoothly they felt the deal went.
Seems to work fine, at least every time I have used it...
Everyone always says "I got sniped by 5 cents" but the truth is, you probably got outbid by $5 or $10 or $20, or maybe $100. Because of proxy bidding, no one but the winner will ever know what amount that she or he bid.
What? No. If I will pay up to $100 for an item on eBay, but the current bid is $10, then I'll enter $100. My bid will show as $12 or whatever minimum increment it is. If someone bids $20, my $100 bid trumps them and becomes listed as $22. If someone snipes in the last second at $50, I'll win the bid with $52 - without having had to pay any attention to the auction past my original bide. If someone snipes $102 in the last second, then they're paying more than I was willing to pay for the item anyway, and so should win the auction.
Why on earth do people bid over and over again, or wake up at a specific time? The eBay system is set up so you can put down the single bid you are willing to pay for an item. The automatic system does it for you. It doesn't show anyone what your maximum amount is; in fact the system is set up to the advantage of the buyer, because if I'm willing to pay $100 but the second bidder only bids $20, then the seller only gets $22 of what I was willing to pay and I keep the rest in my pocket. The problem with eBay is that people treat it as a conventional bid, believing for some reason that you should bid over and over again, just above the opposition. This is actually bad for the buyer, because it tends to draw people into bidding higher than they would originally peg as their maximum.
If you use the system as it is designed, then you cannot be "sniped". You can be outbid by someone who was willing to pay more than you, and it doesn't actually matter whether that happens a second after you bid or a second before the auction closes. If you're outbid, then someone was willing to pay more than you were; simple. However the masses simply do not comprehend this and continue bidding by the rules from another system, which are simply wrong here.
Sniping works against those who don't understand eBay.
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
> Sure, but who knows the absolute max they will pay?
If you go into an auction without knowing the absolute maximum you will pay for the items you're bidding on, you're a damn fool who is going to get taken to the cleaners.
Chris Mattern
Trademe in New Zealand has an option to auto-extend the auction if a bid is received in the last two minutes of bidding. This isn't always used but when it is, it does make a difference.
Snipers are forced to bid just outside the two minute mark which then gives other people a chance to respond if they want...
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crap, I forgot my first /b. Sorry for the bad bolding.
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
The whole reason for the success of eBay is the emotional hysteria that drives up the price step by step. Indeed, this is the mechanism behind all auctions. This is the first time I've heard of the term "sniping", but turns out I have used it many times. It is a rational approach to overcoming the auction madness.
Bidnip have you beat
http://www.bidnip.com/a.php?id=3438
I get a few free snipes if you sign up - they have a great service, it's never failed me.
I paraphrased, but that's more or less the tone of the email.
>> The people who come in and snipe at the last minute always end up paying more than I would have for the item because I set my one bid to what I'm willing to pay and then leave the auction alone.
>>>But the problem with this is that you never win the item. If you still just bid the one amount you're willing to pay, but you do it with a snipe, you're much more likely to actually get the auction item.
The parent is correct from what I've seen. I initially gave up on eBay after finding that I never won any auctions. Then my son-in-law told me that the only way to buy anything there was to show no interest until the last second. He was right. Anytime I bid during an auction I get outbid. When I leave it alone until the auction is ending I often get the item for the amount I would have bid earlier (and lost). Maybe when I bid early it puts the item on more people's radar and makes it look more attractive, so they outbid me. Now I use Craigslist almost exclusively, so I haven't been doing much sniping lately.
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If 'the people' in Amendment 2 are 'the state' then Amendments 1, 2, 4, 9, and 10 benefit the state, not you.
> Great strategy... if you don't actually want to buy anything on ebay.
No, great strategy, period. I have *always* used this strategy when bidding on eBay, and I almost always get what I want. It may take three or four auctions, but I get what I want...and I pay what I planned.
Chris Mattern
What if eBay also had another auction type in addition to normal and Buy It Now ones: silent auctions. It tells you when it ends, the seller may optionally give a reccomended amount, and you get to put in your bid, without knowing what anyone else put down. Now you'd be more compelled to put your maximum bid down.
My sister actually has been part of a team doing academic research on auction results. They took a number of different auction models (11 or so, I think) and ran computer models and did real-world studies to see how much each auction type generated in revenue. The result was surprising, at least to me: all types of auction made approximately the same amount of money. That doesn't necessarily mean anything about how the auction types affected the bidders, but I think it might be less than you'd imagine.
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A better fix would be to instead of putting "5 days 3 hours 2 minutes and 15 seconds" remaining on this item, eBay puts something like "Approximately 5 days left for this item". If a seller puts up a listing, and say the standard is 6 days for a listing (I don't know, I've never sold on ebay and have only made 3 purchases in 4 years) then make the period a minimum of 6 days but up to 6 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds. It would essentially make sniping impossible because there is an uncertainty of 86400 seconds over when the auction will really end.
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Sniping works against those who don't understand eBay.
Yes, agreed. And bidding once and early is the way I used to use eBay back in 1997. But these days, unfortunately, there are literally thousands of stupid bidders who don't understand eBay. So they'll just keep bidding and bidding until they're above your bid, no matter what the value of the item is. Stupid, yes, but that's what happens. The only way to beat these "I must win at any cost" bidders without becoming one youself is to snipe.
If two buyers are willing to pay different amounts, shouldn't the item go to the one willing to pay more? If I won't pay more than $30, then I bid $30. If I'm outbid, I don't get the item but I also don't pay more than the $30 I was willing to - I can save it for some other auction of the same thing. I've very rarely done last-minute bidding, but I've still won a few items (a good percentage for how often I go eBaying). Recently I was outbid on a couple hard drive caddies. They weren't worth more than $15 shipped to me. I bid accordingly, and was outbid. So what - I didn't pay more than they were worth to me.
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True enough. However...
Sniping does get you bargains precisely because people don't put in their max bids. Try putting a test bid on an item that is just higher than the current high bid but lower than your max. Chances are the former high bidder will come back and outbid you again. If I was to put my max in early against such a person, he'd just bid up until hitting his max or until I was outbid. However, sniping against such a person can save some bucks. I just put my max in at the last minute/second. For me, sniping is all about saving a few bucks.
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If your only goal is "don't pay more than $20", then bidding $20 early is fine. If you add maximizing the number of acutions that you win at the price you're willing to pay as a goal, then sniping works better. This is simple game theory: bidding early gives your competitors more information on which to act.
Note that winning autions more frequently effectively means paying less, unless the market is very effecient (which eBay isn't). Given some random distribution of final auction prices, you'll get any given item at any given price eventually, but not necessarily while you're still alive.
Winning auctions at a fixed prices more frequently is the same as winning at a cheaper price by a given fixed deadline.
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I therefore tend to be conservative in my maximum bid. I put in a lower-bound on my maximum. Then if I am outbid later and notice it, if I have time, I can do a more careful analysis.
The problem with sniping is that it prevents me from knowing what my chances of winning are. I don't know how much interest there really is in an item, whether there is any realistic chance of me winning or not. So I don't know if it is worth spending time to figure out exactly what my maximum bid should be, $10, $10.10 or even $15. So I am conservative, underbid, and end up losing.
According to most people replying to you, I must be irrational. I should just bid my maximum straight out. But, then I would waste time determining my maximum on auctions which I had no chance of winning. That's a waste of time -- quite irrational.
Also realize that the computation of the maximum bid has different costs for different people. Indecisive people take more time to compute their true maximum bid.
ubid adds time when a bid comes in
this removes the snipe "feature"
and ensures that the seller makes the best price.
My complaint is when a bidding war comes in between two people
and the price shoots to the moon.
the new person then gives in after ratcheting up the price.
I feel it should drop back to the price it was just before that person entered.
the actual value of the object is not what I would pay for it
but what others would pay for it.
thus, I am over paying when I win an auction.
comment directly in my journal
Perfectly acceptable as long as you're willing to take the risk of vendictive bidders - i.e. ones that make two or three accounts and just prevent the auction from ending. I personally don't eBay that much and when I do I take a look at 'Buy It Now' before anything else. Sure I may spend more than I would otherwise, but if all I'm attempting to do is get something cheaper than retail, I've been successful in my quest and that's all there is to it.
This is already in place on the various QXL auction sites although I think it's only 3 mins extension per bid
Travelling forward in time at a rate of 1 second per second.
That is by far the most intelligent thing I've heard as far as an idea for eBay goes.
What you're saying is that even though Ebay looks like a traditional auction, it's really a sealed bid auction. Sealed bid auctions generally return less for the seller, as they offer less of a chance for people to become emotionally involved and bid irrationally high. It's strange that Ebay wouldn't choose the system that would favor the seller.
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I would be quite happy paying that - but can't because I have to wait to see if I won the last auction. If I was waiting to 'snipe' then I could just walk away.
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I've given up on ebay for the most part. They seem too much like a large greedy evil corporation that maximizes their revenue, even at the expense of customer service. What we need is a real alternative to eBay, which is extremely difficult for an average Joe to start up. Someone with serious muscle and money needs to step up and lay the smackdown on Ebay... *cough cough* google *cough* microsoft
I have no problem doing that except with high end, or heavy items. First, there are often warranties that are only valid in the US and the buyer thinks *I* warranty it. Secondly, especially in Europe, there are customs and high taxes I absolutely do not want to hassle with. With heavy items the buyer often freaks out upon finding out the item will cost $80 to ship (6 weeks delivery by sea). There is extra paperwork on my end (customs forms, having to look up postage for each country, etc.)
That being said I make more money on the items by allowing international bidders on all other items. A seller who rules out all international bidders is quite simply not a good businessman.
Trademe, the kiwi ebay equivelant has an option to Auto extend an auction for 2 min after the last bid.
Works great for sellers, no sniping, you always have time to rebid, pushes the final sales figure up too.
since in addition to idiots bidding the auction up for the hell of it, you've got sellers who bid on their own crap when it doesn't go for what they wanted. I've known 5 ebayers who all did it (years ago, don't know 'em anymore). I remember running across an obscure piece of computer equipment I wanted, and a seller who was running 5 separate auctions for it. For two weeks I'd bid, and for two weeks the same damn ebayer would out bid me within 30 minutes. There were 5 of them on ebay at all times. Doesn't take a genius to figure out what was going on.
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> The problem is the sniping phenomenon.
It's not a problem. Simply bid the most you're prepared to pay and you'll win if you're the highest bidder, and you won't if you're not. That's not a problem - that's eBay. If you would have bid above your highest had you known there was going to be a sniper then simply bid *that* amount as your highest. There's nothing wrong with sniping - it's good for the seller, and it's good for anyone who puts an honest maximum bid down initially.
You make a good point, but eBay could easily make this easy to deal with. You could make a bid be conditional on being outbid in another auction, create a whole chain of bids, and automatically order them based on auction closing times. They could even handle and resolve cases where multiple auctions close at exactly the same time, and apply first-to-bid rules there as well (among conditional bids only; already-bid non-conditionals would still be "earlier" than any conditional bids, although a conditional bid might still bump up the price at the very end, and thus would have to show up in the bidding history to explain the ending price).
One thing to note, in the commentary in the article, they mention that the study showed an average of fewer than 2 bids per auction. Sure, you're going to win lots of auctions if you bid on items that no one else was interested in (and thus only make one bid), and are much less likely to win an auction if you bid on items that other people are bidding on (especially if you bid and re-bid multiple times, indicating you aren't really sure exactly how much you're willing to pay for it).
Ultimately, sniping works, because not everybody uses Ebay `in the optimal way'. If everybody did what you suggested, then you're right -- sniping would not help. But not everybody does this!
Ultimately, even those people who understand how proxy bidding works often don't bid the maximum they're willing to pay. Well, they might think they are, but as soon as somebody outbids them, they realize that they are willing to pay more, and they enter in another bid. Often this continues several times, and you find people spending far more for things that they could just go down to Wal-Mart and buy brand new.
If you are willing to spend $100 on something, it benefits you to make that $100 bid in the last ten seconds, because by doing so you deny somebody else the realization that they were just outbid and the time to enter in a new bid. By doing so, you generally get it for less money (or increase the odds that you're the highest bidder, take your pick.)
Sniping works. Granted, it works because not everybody uses Ebay `in the optimal way', but either way, it works. (And by `works' I mean is that it often (usually?) gets you the item at a lower price than bidding the same amount early in the auction would have.)
The only signifigant downside to sniping is that you can miss your bid entirely by forgetting to make the bid, or making it too slowly, or being unable to do so due to network issues or something, but by using a program or service to snipe for you these risks are minimized. (An insignifigant downside to sniping is that if two people bid the same amount, the first bid wins, but in practice this generally only means that you'll pay another dollar or so for something. It also helps if you set your maximum bid to a bit over some even value. For example, don't bid $100. Instead, bid $101.24, which will beat $100, $101 and $101.23. Most other people will just bid $100 ...)
Ebay must be a frustrating place for you. All items go to someone who pays just $0.50 more than the second highest bidder was willing to pay. Just FIFTY CENTS!
Even banks don't treat you well if something turns out to be fraudulent. My brother mistakenly cashed a fraudulent check from a buyer in Canada, and after an hour when he realized the check was bad, he went to the bank and personally spoke to several people to report the incident and inform them that the whole thing was an accident. The bank was nice at the time, but a week later they treated him like a criminal, cancelling his account, refunding the actual money he had left, and told him that he could never open a bank account there again because of his involvement with fraudulent activity (even though he was an innocent victim).
Ebay is set up to maximize selling prices - sniping is the best countermeasure, it benefits ALL bidders, even the ones who do not 'win' the auctions.
The whole idea of entering a maximum bid that the system will automatically bid up to causes the actual bid price to quickly escalate. That leaves time for human psychology to kick in and for the low-bidder(s) to change their mind about what their maximum bid would really be.
With "set it and forget it" sniping tools, there is no early bid escalation and thus no time to change your mind and do the "well, just 5 dollars more" dance. All snipers put in their maximum bid price and let the chips fall where they may.
I use a sniping service and I end up underbidding on at least 90% of the auctions I bid on. But that is OK by me, it means I was not tricked by the system into over-paying on those items (and my sniping service does not charge me for 'losing' bids). It also means that the guy who was the highest bidder probably paid less than if all the snipers had bid the "traditional" way. So he benefits too, regardless of if he sniped or not.
If you are sniping and you really absolutely must have the item, you can enter a ridiculously high max bid price and chances are that you will be the high bidder and that you will end up paying less than if you had just used the "traditional" bidding process and let ebay auto-bid for you as other bidders put in their maximums too.
So, no matter what the situation, sniping benefits all bidders - snipers and non-snipers alike - by helping to keep bid inflation in check.
Sniping only works if everyone else is sniping.
No, sniping works when somebody else is playing the 'keep bidding more than the current bid to stay the winning bidder' game. If you increase the current bid, they'll just bid a bit higher. But if you don't, they won't. So you don't, until the very end when they can't play their game anymore.
The first time the value of sniping really clicked for me was when I went truck shopping on eBay. I kept bidding a reasonable value for the trucks and kept being outbid by somebody every time. 75% of the time the same truck appeared right back on ebay a few days later because the bozos who kept outbidding me weren't really serious. Well, then I decided to snipe a truck and bam, I got the first one I sniped, no problem, and at a price that was actually lower than I was willing to pay.
So, to sum up, sniping only works if somebody else bidding is retarded. And that's a pretty good bet for eBay.
The intereseting thing about ebay is that it is both simultaniously. The public bid is the minimum amount required from the highest bidder to win the object. The private bid is what they are actually willing to pay. You see their low public bid and think you can beat it, thereby running it up closer to their private bid. Then you get emotionally involved in beating them, even though they aren't online at the time!
Changa hates change.
I've been defrauded too many times through various scams... I did a cost/benefit analysis and decided it wasn't worth it. It's not a nationalistic thing, just pure economics. BTW PayPal's seller protection policy only applies to transactions between US, UK, and Canadian parties.
"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard
In my experience Ebay is not the best place to go for low prices. One of the things I buy alot of on the Internet are rare, out of print books and going to Ebay is pretty much something I only do if I have no success elsewehere and am forced to bid there. I have much better results going to specialist book selling webs starting with Amazon which has a service for used book sellers, various other similar internet based services or small mon-and-pop type used bookshops flogging their inventory over the internet via simple HTML based Frontpage web. I have yet to be cheated out of my money by one of these sellers and the prices I get from these sources are often lower than even the reserves in an Ebay auction and finding these sellers is usually as simple as a bit of imaginative 'Googling', it also helps to search more languages than just English. Some of the auctions I have witnessed on Ebay have made me question the sanity of the bidders. I get the feeling that alot of people who buy on Ebay (and by no means all of them or even most of them) are addicts who spend rediculous amounts of money on objects that I know for a fact are available elsewhere for a fraction of the price.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
No.
You just proved his point beautifully. You obviously don't understand what's going on here.
Yes, in a perfect world, everyone would proxy bid like they're supposed to, and nobody would pay more than they're willing to pay for an item. Moreover, the person who was willing to pay the most, would win the auction.
But that's fantasyland. In the Real World(tm), there are two reasons why you should always snipe to get the best deal:
Example: your max bid on an item is $50. DumbJoe has already bid $30, hoping he'll get it for that. You come along and bid your $50 well before the auction ends. The new high bid is set at $31 by eBay's system. DumbJoe is notified that he's been outbid, so in the heat of the moment, he comes in and bids $40. Again, your proxy outbids him up to $41. DumbJoe decides he's not going to let you beat him, so bids $51. Oops, you lose!
Now, let's redo that with sniping. DumbJoe sits as the high bidder at $30 until about 20 seconds are left in the auction. At that time, you place your $50 bid. Price goes up to $31, auction ends, DumbJoe has no time to get caught up in the bidding war. You get the item, and at a damn good price, too.
Let's say many sellers are offering the item you wanted for a max of $50. You bid on the auction that DumbJoe is bidding, and he gets into his emotional bidding war. He drives the price up to your max of $50 before giving up. You win at $50, which is what you were willing to pay. No problem, right? WRONG.
Meanwhile, another auction ends a few hours later, selling the exact same item for $32. Oops! You could have saved $15-20 by either sniping on DumbJoe's auction, or deciding that its price had gone out of line with what the market was paying on other auctions for the same thing. You could take your time and wait for a relatively low-priced auction about ready to end and snipe that. The savings could be substantially below what your maximum price is.
Moral of the story: ALWAYS snipe. Lots of dumbass snipe because they don't understand the proxy bid system. Other dumbasses don't snipe because they don't understand their competition.
If you bid a max of 20 and a sniper still beats you, you would have paid more than $20 to win the item. Therefore, paid more than you were willing to. Therefore, failed at your objective. Besides, max bids are kept secret, so exactly what information is being broadcast early?
i am a soviet space shuttle
Like it or not, sniping is fully within the rules set up by the auction, and is threfore pretty much fair by definition. If you don't like it, don't use Ebay
This is a sealed first-price auction, basically. Everyone submits secret bids, with the highest bid winning. I suspect eBay doesn't offer this model because it's not exciting for compulsive buyers. The sense of urgency created by the live competition and time constraint of a modified-English auction like eBay's are probably seen as crucial elements to attracting and retaining regular buyers.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
Technically, if everyone were immune to psychological influences and bid precisely at their unwavering maximum, sniping would have no effect. As it stands, this is not the case, and sniping is a better tactic.
im in ur
If someone is willing to pay more than you, then by logic they should win the auction; what exactly is the problem there? You weren't willing to pay $25 in the first place, so where's your loss?
In the second case, the other user is willing to pay $10, and you were willing to pay $20, so by logic you should win the item; you were willing to pay more, so you won. Where's the problem there?
Unless the definition of "maximum" changed when I wasn't looking, which I don't think it did.
i am a soviet space shuttle
If you consistently win the auction, that means you paid too much money for the item.
:-)
Or you're into stuff that not a lot of people are. I've snapped a few items where there were few other bidders, and sometimes the item would have a fairly substantial store/street price. Due to lack of popularity, the stores charge more (less sales=more wasted shelf-space stocking), and there are less people to outbid you.
The mis-spelled items concept is rather good, as is the idea of searching by category or generic term rather than name. There are some dumb buyers out there, but a lot of sellers who can't spell (not first-language english, not familiar with the particular product brand, etc). Search the category you want, and maybe enter "video card" rather than "GeForce 7200" and you might find that "GeeForce" or "G-Force" video card with a mispelled title. Of course, in that case you want to be on the watch for knock-off brands, otherwise you might end up with a Sorny or Magnetbox
The local ebay clone (doing quite well for itself - sold for ~ US$400mil this year) has had auto-extend for some time. The period is two minutes. It has virtually eliminated sniping (provided the auction is set to end at a normal time and not in the middle of the night). Sellers love it, buyers hate it - I do wish ebay would adopt it.
No, I did not read the f***ing article!
In the second case, the other user is willing to pay $10, and you were willing to pay $20, so by logic you should win the item; you were willing to pay more, so you won. Where's the problem there?
But that's not the situation in the second case. The other user is willing to pay $25, but doesn't bid correctly by bidding $25. Instead they bid $10 and figure they'll just bid higher if somebody outbids them. It's them being stupid. Sniping is taking advantage of other bidder's stupidity in not originally bidding their maximum.
Any poster with brains would understand that eBay if rife with fraud, and that, as a bidder, my goal is to get the best deal for ME, not to give the seller the most money he can milk from me. Sniping actually nets you a better deal on eBay more often than not. Here's how it plays out:
Let's say I want a "Bunky Bonanza Sally Wets Herself" doll to complete my collection of dolls which tinkle on themselves. Knowing that this doll is something of a collectable among the small but ferocious base of collectors that collect pee dolls, I decide that the most I want to spend is $100, and enter this as my maximum bid. If there is genuine interest by others shown in the doll, then I will be outbid fair and square. HOWEVER, if there is not legitimate interest, and the doll hovers around 12 dollars, well, here comes Friend Of Seller. He bids against me, noting that the system autoupdates my bid. Now, his job is to push my bid up to see how high I've set my 'maximum'. Maybe the Seller has a "press-your-luck" limit, and the friend stops at 50 and lets me win at 52, $40 more than I might have HAD to pay. OR, let's say that seller just has his friend push until his high bid sticks. I'm sad that I don't get my doll, but lo and behold, what should appear in my messages?! It seems that the 'buyer' for the dollie I covet is a flake, and the seller noticed I was the bidder after that. He can sell me the doll for $95 or whatever before he puts it back onto eBay. Of course, if I'm a collector, and was WILLING to pay $100, then I feel I've scored a coup, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. But what I really did was pay $83 more than I should have in a concerted scam to inflate the price of a doll.
In the sniping scenario, I can get outbid, if my final bid is not enough in the last moments. But if there genuinely is little movement on the items, I might get away with the doll for $18 instead (and there's a high likelihood of that).
Let's not pretend that perfect markets exist on eBay. The RESERVE is a tool that lets a seller ensure that he recoups what he believes is fair for an item. Sniping is a tool that protects you from fraudulent item inflation, and often wins you more auctions in the long run.
--- I'm going sane in a crazy world.
If 20.53 wins, then 21.00 would have won as well. Ok, so you might save 47 cents. The real problem is, there is no fixed line where it all of a sudden becomes "too expensive". If 21.00 is your maximum, are you SURE you wouldn't buy it for 21.01? It's only another penny. Come on, sir, just one wafer-thin mint? Which grain of sand is the one that changes it from "some sand" to "a pile of sand"? Which strand of hair do you lose that you all of a sudden become "balding"? At which particular second do you become "old"?
Add to this the fact that bidders can review what other bidders are bidding on. I can identify an ebay account as belonging to someone interested in the same things that I am and then watch what they bid on. In effect, letting them do the search, then snipe the items they find if of interest to me. It's a common practice, and there are even GUI-based tools to use for said purpose (i.e. AuctionSentry.) This practice is not possible if it's a snipe bidder, someone like that can't be 'tracked' except after-the-fact.
For this reason, in addition to other reasons cited in this big discussion, I almost always use a sniping program to make my bids for me.
Instead the point is to get the product at a CHEAPER price than standard
Unless you're looking for something that's no longer available through "standard" channels. In this case it's not just a matter of picking your auctions carefully, it's a matter of spreading things out over time.
Unless you want something very specific, or you're in a hurry, you don't have to rely on winning one auction. It's more like fishing with multiple poles. You cast out several lines over a certain period of time, and figure maybe 1 in 4 will actually catch anything. Who cares if line #1 doesn't get any fish, or even #2, if you get one on #3?
As an example: over the last few months, I've started picking up a series of comic books from the 1940s. You can't just go to a store and buy them, because only a small percentage of comic stores even carry books that old. Your best bets are to visit collectibles fairs, comic-book conventions, and online stores -- and even those tend to focus on the rare or higher-quality books that cost in the $100-$10,000 range. Ebay, on the other hand, has a steady stream of stores, individual collectors, and people who find old comics in their attics, selling everything from the ultra-rare first appearance of whoever to the torn, soda-stained but still readable random issue of series X. So for the most part, I just bid my max on any auction that fits the criteria, and figure I'll only win a fraction of them. So far it's worked out pretty well.
If someone snipes $102 in the last second, then they're paying more than I was willing to pay for the item anyway, and so should win the auction.
Yes, but they're only bidding a petty amount more than your $100 limit. The person who 'sniped' $102 may have bid just that $102 or $150 and you can't know. But if the bidding was at $86 up until the last seconds of the auction, he might have bid $96 and your snipe of $100 would have gotten the item.
I have used people's 'bidding history' against them in competition. I've seen people who regularly buy a particular item that I want one copy of. By checking, you can see what they're used to paying for it. In 'shrinkwrapped software' buying, there are people who specialize in snapping up things like 'fully licensed' Microsoft Office.
Once, one of them even pissed me off. So I made sure that she paid her 'top dollar bid' for the particular item I wanted for awhile, before 'winning' the copy that I actually purchased. I did this by simply bidding her proxy up on a number of instances to just below what I knew she would pay.
It's a big worldwide marketplace, not just a place where people swap Pez dispensers anymore.
Your exact scenario is exactly what everyone is complaining about...
if you bid $110, what you thought it was worth and was your absolute maximum, someone can still come in and snipe with $110.05, because I mean, what is 5 cents when you won the item?
I don't know exactly how eBay works(I have never used it) but I think not showing the time left could help, instead just have show the time left as a category like very long, short etc.. that way no one can purposely come in with 10 minutes left. It can still happen, but less likely.
People using the word "fair" with respect to this phenomenon are probably people that have lost a covetted item to a sniper bidder, or were forced to sell something for less than they anticipated because interest in their auction was low and they felt that the practice of sniping cost them money. Basically, they got the short end of a monetary transaction because of their own ignorance and are now looking for a scapegoat. "Sniping" they call!
Fairness has nothing to do with this.
There are other policies of ebay's that I would call into question first.
The problem with ebay is that the auctions are too long and not in real time. These are what make actual auctions work. Let's say we have an item I for which I am willing to pay $350 but in reality I will go to $400. But I would much rather pay $10 or even $50 for the item. Now, the item is currently bidding for $15. "Aha!" I think, "I can get this for a steal if I bid only $20." But then I think, "Now if someone else starts bidding, and their max is below mine, I am going to have to pay more for this item. So I should keep my max secret until the last possible second." So you basically have everyone sitting around and not bidding because they don't want to push the bid up anymore than it needs to go. The result is sniping, and ebay's current method of auction is just not working otherwise.
Personally, I just Buy It Now.
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
I, for one, sell mostly vintage collectable electronics types of things (they sell to enthusiasts and devotees, not regular-type non-nerds,) and I am actually happier if I can sell to someone overseas (non-US) because I like having friends all over the world.
It's the only way to get a good deal! http://sourceforge.net/projects/jbidwatcher You'll have my ebay sniping tool when you pry it from my DMCA'ed, dead hands! ~ criminally insane robot
"The problem with eBay is that people treat it as a conventional bid, believing for some reason that you should bid over and over again, just above the opposition. This is actually bad for the buyer, because it tends to draw people into bidding higher than they would originally peg as their maximum." Which is exactly why you shouldn't outbid them until the very end. Less time for them to put in more conventional bids, driving up the cost of your winning bid (up to your max).
You assume that the maximum is a static number, but of course it depends on the market at the time of the bid. Availability of similar items in other auctions may well mean that you're only willing to pay half of what you might be willing to pay if there was only one auction. Bidding your personal maximum doesn't remove market observation from your arsenal. What the maximum bidders are saying is that participating in a manual bid-war is counter-productive. It takes more time and effort and it incites auction-fever in many people, both of which make the item more expensive than it needs to be. On top of that, bidding late has additional benefits: Early bidders unnecessarily provide information to the competition and they commit to a bid when they don't have all the information they could have before the end of the auction. Not only is sniping empirically successful, there are also good theoretical reasons for it.
And there is an easy fix: A bid will extend the auction by ~10 minutes if received in the last 10 minutes. Voila, no more sniping.
There are problems with this, such as a situation in which the auction keeps being extended by 10 minutes again, and again, and again.
A much better, complete, solution is not to display bids to the bidders. Let them bid however much they're willing to pay, without knowing how much other people have bid. What difference does the timing of their bid make then?
Please, think in the other 95% of the world.
Well, I used to. A few years ago, when I was still selling/buying internationally on eBay, I was been the "victim" of Customs one too many times. Since most of my trading on eBay is for media and similar small stuff, they tend to be more easily searched/opened by Customs since there's an active piracy/counterfeiting market in such goods. Even though I've only ever bid/sold legit goods, they still tend to be intercepted by ignorant or undertrained package checkers. I have received empty packing envelopes and have had my goods stopped at the border (requiring the recipient to visit a Customs office before release) one too many times.
And this was all before 9/11, I imagine things have only gotten worse since then with the more paranoid "mail bomb" checking that goes on now... I'm not even shipping to or buying from Canada, anymore.
Those who complain about affect & effect on
Thank God! There is someone out there who understands the EBay system and posted this reply; save me having to type it. As you said, the problem is not with sniping, the problem is with the EBay system itself.
I know this is a little of topic, but the design of the EBay system is terrible and largely unusable. It is no wonder that the average Joe out there does not understand how it all works when the process is so unclear and help is buried and spread across numerous screens. Perhaps they should hire this guy.
I don't make predictions, and I never will.
Exactly. And there's not really a better system they could pick, since traditional auctions depend heavily on the real-time component. So yeah, snipers get into that a bit, but someone with a high enough sealed bid can still beat them, no matter how "emotionally involved" they become. There ARE places that run realtime online auctions, I believe, but I doubt they're anywhere near as popular as Ebay.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
Let's say, for example, that there is some old game on eBay that I want to buy. I really want it, and I'd personally pay $500 for one to get my hands on it. But, from the eBay past auction history, I see that they usually sell for about $100. Now I don't know about you, but if I know something usually goes for about $100, I'd rather pay about $100 and use the extra $400 on something else. (See that? I would pay up to $500, if that was what they sold for. But, since they don't, I'd prefer to pay less.) I would hate to be the person who won one for $475 when the ones the week before and the week after went for $100.
This statement is contradictory. If you'd pay $500 to get a hold of something, you shouldn't feel bad about getting it for $475. The fact of the matter is you are saying you would not be willing to pay $500 after checking previous auctions and seeing that the item in question goes for $100.
So I put my early bid in at the average selling price, about $100. If I see the price go up to $101 and it's less than a few hours before it ends, I might bump it up to $110. That's still well below my maximum, but it's reasonable to me. If it goes up to $115, I might bump it up to $120. Or, maybe by then another one is listed, and I'll move to it. Or, I'll see that I'm bidding against 5-6 others, and so I'll pass this one up and wait for the demand to die down. I can't do any of those things if I start out with a bid of $150 - maybe I'd lose it, or maybe I'd pay $149 when five more were listed during the week - oversupplying the demand - at $100 each
If the item is worth $500 to you, you should be overjoyed at getting it for $150. If you get it for $150 and are upset the others went for $100, you paid too much, you should've bid a max of $100. The strategy you discuss above is irrational and is the only reason why sniping works. It does not make any sense to bid $100 if you would be willing to bump it to $120 later. Just start with $120. If someone snipes you for $125 they paid more than you were willing to pay. Simple as that.
Winning an auction isn't about getting the item at the lowest cost. It's about getting the item for less than or equal to what you were willing to pay.
How is it not fair if I bid my maximum bid in the last ten minutes? Assuming the other person has bid their maximum as well, that sounds very fair. It avoids the Dueling Bids phenomenon and saves both parties money in the end.
Bid your maximum, and let it go how it will. I stopped participating in auctions until near the end because of all the people who bid, then once they get outbid, they bid up as little as eBay will allow until they get me to my maximum bid (you can tell if you bit $27.79, and it stops at $28, because that's less than the minimum increment), because I'm willing to pay my maximum bid, but I don't want to just because some dick is angry that I outbid them.
Bid wars suck. A $10 item is suddenly going for $60. The only people sniping hurts are the sellers, because it takes away the inflated value of items caused by bid wars.
(And yes, I've been sniped before, and it irritates me, but that's the way it works.)
A bid will extend the auction by ~10 minutes if received in the last 10 minutes.
And it's the auction that never ends. It goes on and on my friends...
It isn't the system, it's the people. They're weak and easily manipulated by cheap psychological tricks.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
The only way for eBay to not be a hopeless seller's market is through sniping. That's the only way things even approach fair market value. Case in point: most computer gear I've looked at over the last few years costs more to buy used on eBay than to buy it brand new through the cheapest Pricewatch vendor. 'Nuff said.
The problem with your "let the proxy do all the work" method is that people who bid once find themselves repeatedly getting outbid by a dollar or two. Now, I realize that you can say "If you were willing to pay a dollar more, that wasn't really your maximum bid," but that's a foolish statement, as it ignores the basic laws of human nature and economics. A small change in the price of a product is considered insignificant. Thus, for any maximum price "n", the price "n+1" seems no less reasonable (unless n=1 or something). Therefore, in effect, no one can ever truly have a maximum price.
Of course, that's not really true, because you would never have set n+20 as your maximum price. The point is that the person who outbid you didn't do so at n+21. He/she did so at n+1, so regardless of your value of n, that's a huge disappointment. This is what usually happens. When it goes for twice your maximum bid, you aren't too disappointed, but more often than not, you are outbid by such a small amount that you repeatedly kick yourself for not bidding again.
Proxy bidding is basically showing your cards to all the other players at the table before they make their wager. From a human psychology perspective, there is little difference between a proxy bid and a public bid. The only difference is that you might pay less if your bid price is way above the fair market value of the product or no one else is interested in the product. In all other cases, someone will bid the price up to somewhere close to your maximum bid or will bid beyond it.
Thus, if you bid at somewhere around the median buying price by bidding early by proxy, your odds of winning are almost zero, as (really obscure stuff notwithstanding) there will almost always be at least one person who is trying to "win" the item and will bid just a little bit more than your original maximum. Proxy bidding merely postpones the inevitable (and drives up the median price slightly, since this auction contributes to the new median and ends slightly higher than the median). By contrast, if you bid at somewhere around the median buying price by sniping, your odds of winning rise to about 50/50 for the very same dollar amount bid, as about half the auctions would have otherwise ended at a lower price.
Getting a good deal on eBay doesn't mean letting the proxy do its job; you'll almost never successfully bid on anything that way. Getting a good deal on eBay means outsmarting the dumbest person/people bidding through psychology. There will -always- be some idiot willing to win even at a completely unreasonable cost. The only chance of winning is to discourage that person from making such an unreasonably high bid by bidding really low, then not bidding until after that person has stopped paying attention. This makes that person feel like he/she has a very large margin of safety at a low bid. Then, when you bid near the end of the auction, the odds are, you'll win it unless it has gone above your actual maximum, in which case you could not have won it anyway.
So yeah, this is basic statistics and basic psychology. The ultimate "duh" story. Am I supposed to be surprised? :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Maybe when I bid early it puts the item on more people's radar and makes it look more attractive, so they outbid me.
Sometimes, this is true. I try and avoid auctions with bids on them, simply to avoid having to pay more, but I've seen a 7 day auction go three with no bids, and then once one person bids, it explodes.
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
I've heard this argument a hundred times. For years, I've been hearing that there's no advantage to sniping. But what all these arguments fail to take into account is human psychology. Consider this situation
Let's say you're browsing ebay, but you don't really have your mind set on buying something. You see something you kind of want with a bid of $40 and 2 hours left to go. You'd gladly pay $80 dollars and you'd have to pay $100 in a store, so you bid $50. Then you go surf somewhere else or watch TV or something, and maybe check on your bid in an hour. If you're still the high bidder, you might get confident that no-body else is interested and assume it's yours. Later you find out that someone outbid you at $52 with less than a minute to go.
Now let's consider the same situation, except you're the sniper. If you bid what you're willing to pay, you would have gotten into a bidding war long before the auction ended. But since you waited until the last minute, you lulled the other bidder into a false sense of security.
The point is that many people shop on ebay like the first person: they place their first bid for less than they are willing to pay because they're hoping that they will get it for less. This is not a rational strategy, but people do it.
Another reason people bid less than they're willing to pay is that they bid on multiple items when they really don't want to buy them all. But if they can get them all for their first bid, then they will. If they get outbid on some of them, then they'll have to make a choice. If their choice is the item you want, then you'll lose by bidding early.
If everyone bid what they were willing to pay without paying attention to the time left, and didn't bid on more items then they wanted to buy, we would all be better off. But things just don't work that way, especially considering the wide range of intelligence and maturity levels you encounter there.
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
Then you are paying too much for items that you could get cheaper by using an auction sniping tool. It's not just about whether you win the auction, it's also how much did you waste?
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
why is sniping a problem?
if someone decides how much they are willing to pay for an item and bids exactly that at a time of their choosing, then what's the problem? it's no guarantee of success, anyone else could bid a higher amount (or the same amount, earlier). all sniping does is avoid the risk of getting carried away and bidding more than you're really willing to pay.
is there some requirement that they get into a bidding war with morons who get excited by the idea of "winning" an auction? it's not a competition, it's a transaction.
If you thought it was worth $110, why'd you only bid $100?
I went to China. I saw a pair of shoes that were worth $40 to me. They were priced at $20. I talked him down to $10. With your logic, I should have told him that I refused to pay his cheap price of $20 and I would insist on paying no less than $40 for them. Why am I required to bid the maximum that it is worth? That certainly means it isn't a good deal. Not to mention that I've seen many things (including things I bid on) go for 20% to 50% more on eBay than what one could get it for at Amazon. Surely I shouldn't put in a bid at "what it is worth" when I think it is worth more than what Amazon is charging for it.
Or are you a sniper that just doesn't like people complaining about your bidding strategy?
Learn to love Alaska
Clearly he wants to warn them that Anarke_Incarnate uses slashdot and therefore has a good chance of being a closet smelly hippie for gun control.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
This isn't about the mechanics of the system, it's about the mechanics of the human mind.
The point that keeps getting made is that people don't always enter their "maximum" bid. Not everyone has their budget planned down to the last dollar, most are just flying by the seat of their pants. When the auction is about to end, the bid rate on a hot item will generally increase, especially if the current top bid is low. It increases because people will bid what they want or would prefer to pay as a minimum, but in reality they'll go a few bucks more. They'll justify itself to themselves somehow: skip a pack of smokes, a rented movie, dinner with the girlfriend... They'll find a reason to pull out that extra $5, $10, $20 or more so they can bid just a little higher.
And the email alerts, with their excited exclamation points and bold text and the obvious-to-some-of-us encouraging phrase, "You have been outbid. Bid again now!" are just about all it takes to get average Joe to start looking for ways he can save a few bucks so he can have his new thingamagadget.
Let's say this hypothetical item starts at $1. So the item starts at $1, you watch it. Somebody comes along and bids $5, the current bid is increased to $2. Somebody else comes along and bids $4, the current bid is increased to $5. The same bidder turns it over in his mind and decides that given the number of search results for this item, he can go to $7. He bids, and the current bid is $7. Another bidder comes along, she's willing to pay $10 because it retails for $18. She bids $10, the current bid is set to $10. She rethinks this though, goes back, and alters her bid to be $11, after calculating shipping charges and realising it's still a good deal. High bid is stil $10. You come along and snipe in the end, and win at $11.
Let's look at it again, but with your initial $100 maximum bid. Item starts at $1, you bid $100. Somebody comes along and bids $5, the current bid is increased to $6. Somebody else comes along and does his mental gymnastics and determines that he'll go for $8, just a couple bucks more than the current bid. ("just a couple bucks more" is such a loaded phrase) So somebody else comes along and she bids $10, current bid is set to $11. She thinks about it for a bit, and it's just a couple bucks more, so she bids $12. The bid is incremented to $13, and you win.
I'm not saying that it would go either way necessarily. What I am saying is that there are variables involved which may not make sense to you, but they make sense to the average Mary, Dick, Jane and Bob that come along and empty their wallets for a thingamawhatchamacallit.
Just remember this: "it's just a couple bucks more..." and "You have been outbid. Bid again now!" and then mentally picture the "average" person buying stuff on eBay.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
Once, one of them even pissed me off. So I made sure that she paid her 'top dollar bid' for the particular item I wanted for awhile, before 'winning' the copy that I actually purchased. I did this by simply bidding her proxy up on a number of instances to just below what I knew she would pay.
You are my eBay hero.
"I don't ship internationally", come on! I'll never be able to buy something from you! Why don't you have a more flexible way, like a minimun number of stars, or only allow paypal as payment?
Please, think in the other 95% of the world
as a seller, I can see his point. There are so many scams that go on when you allow international shipping.
If he is still making money while not "thinking in the other 95% of the world" I don't see a problem.
Like it or not, sniping is fully within the rules set up by the auction, and is threfore pretty much fair by definition.
You do not know the meaning of the word as used, then. No one is saying it is a violations of the TOS. You are essentially claming that something must be a violation of the TOS to be unfair. What is being claimed is that sniping is, as written elsewhere, like a semi-sealed bid system. The sniper knows everyone else's bids, and no one knows the sniper's bid. Do you think a true semi-sealed bid system would be fair? A select few get access to everyone else's bids, but no one ever gets to see theirs? I'm not asking if it would violate the TOS of eBay, but whether you think it is "fair."
Learn to love Alaska
It works because you only have to snipe for a value $1 typically above the max bid that's already there. So the person can get it for $1 more than what you're willing to pay. Say they put in a max bid $1 more than what you are willing to bid early on and let the proxy thing do it's work. Well instantly the proxy will be up to your own max bid even when the auction is not close to over. You might get outbid by $1 and decide you can up your bid by $5 to try and win it. Then the other person has likely bid more than that. What will happen is you will increase your bid causing someone else to increase theirs which eventually ends up that the winner pays more. If you sniped at the last minute you're most likely going to pay less money since the person your are outbidding won't have a chance to beat the sniper by $1. Hopefully that makes some sense heh.
Link to Physical Review E Article:
http://www.box.net/public/lsp933t2un
Click on "ebay.pdf"
l'Homme n'est Rien l'Oeuvre Tout: Gustave Flaubert to George Sand
So why didn't you bid $110 for it then??
Because I know it's worth $110, but I only want it for $100 or less. Or do you not understand the difference between what someone wants to pay, what someone is willing to pay, and what someone is capable of paying? They are all different numbers, but you seem to be replying as if you think that they are all the same.
In your scenario you would have then won it for $100.10. But then the sniper might have bid $110.05, and you still would have lost. Would you still be mad?
When did I ever say I was "mad?" I am annoyed at the unfairness of the system. Those with lots of time on their hands, especially as bids end, can convert that time to money by sniping. I don't want to be part of that system, so I do not opt in. It doesn't make me mad, it makes me lose, so it makes me go to other places to buy things.
Maybe the sniper thought it was worth $120, but he got it for $100.05 because you only thought it was worth $100. Not $100.05.
Then why didn't the sniper bid $120 for it when they first saw the item? You can't claim that I'm wrong for not bidding the absolute maximum I was willing to pay for it when I first saw it when the snipers refuse to do the same.
You don't seem to understand how ebay works.
Yeah, I do. $100 shit sells for $200. I go to Amazon and buy it for $100 there with free shipping, and I don't have to use PalPal. If I wanted to collect things, eBay is great for finding one-of-a-kinds, but to buy barely used common items, I have rarely seen a bargain in the last few years. Even the snipers are stupid. I think they think "if he's willing to pay $180 for it and there's 5 days left on the auction, it must be worth $200" and so goes the dumb sniper...
Learn to love Alaska
What is it about these studies? A physicist does this study. Not a statistician, not a mathematician, not an economist. Like the forces of nature have anything to do with the price of rubber chickens on ebay. I new I should have done that study on whether or not there was bacteria on Uranus!!!!
There is a group of rare wares - say, car parts. There's a thousand or more parts for each car model. A single part may spend a year on display before someone decides to buy it, no matter what the price - but when they decide they need it, they are ready to pay quite a bit. So they bid the amount the item is displayed for. Quite low, because keeping it up for a year would cost quite a bit, plus seems competetive. Then the seller uses a fake account, a shill, to bid higher. The buyer will quite likely battle for that single part which can be only one on the whole Ebay. And instead of paying $10, you'll need to pay $50 to outbid the shill and get the obscure rare part.
Not so with sniping. Shot the item 6s before the auction ends for $10. No time to cancel the auction, no time to place a bid by a shill, and even if one is placed, the shill will be the one winning the auction and the buyer will have a week or so to find the part, maybe from the competitor.
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I went to China. I saw a pair of shoes that were worth $40 to me. They were priced at $20. I talked him down to $10. With your logic, I should have told him that I refused to pay his cheap price of $20 and I would insist on paying no less than $40 for them. Why am I required to bid the maximum that it is worth?
Why are you bidding on auctions at all, with that attitude? You bid what you're willing to pay. Ebay's system gives you the cheapest price it can, while still having you be the one to win. Don't put in more than you're willing to pay. It's really quite simple.
That certainly means it isn't a good deal. Not to mention that I've seen many things (including things I bid on) go for 20% to 50% more on eBay than what one could get it for at Amazon. Surely I shouldn't put in a bid at "what it is worth" when I think it is worth more than what Amazon is charging for it.
The people who bid higher than Amazon's price are idiots, and don't understand auctions either.
Or are you a sniper that just doesn't like people complaining about your bidding strategy?
I've bid on about 4 things on Ebay in the past 10 years. I've never once sniped. In fact, the last auction I won, I did so because I put in the most I was willing to pay. Some jackass tried to snipe me, and didn't even get close to my maximum bid. I laughed at him. Don't take out your frustration on me just because you don't understand the concept of an auction.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
That's how Furbid works. The problem with it is that I don't want to be caught in a bidding game with a n00b who wants to outbid me at all cost (and if he does, he will whine about cancelling his bid because he was just "trying me out". Or that I can have my bid on low-demand but rare item raised by shills. Bang, shot, mine or not. I get it for no more than I'm ready to pay and the only danger is that if two n00bs get into this outbidding fight and get the price overblown, I'll have to look for the seller to put the item back on auction.
With items I wish to have, want to snipe and see no interest, I let the owner know I'm interested by "marking" the auction with low but somewhat reasonable bid early. Say, an item worth $100 for me and starting from $10 will get $40 bid now and $100 sniped. Of course the $40 is a free advertisement for the item, getting more competition in, but I'd rather cope with extra competition than the owner cancelling the auction 6 hours before the end just to put it on display again because they think there's no offers.
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What? No. If I will pay up to $100 for an item on eBay, but the current bid is $10, then I'll enter $100. My bid will show as $12 or whatever minimum increment it is. If someone bids $20, my $100 bid trumps them and becomes listed as $22. If someone snipes in the last second at $50, I'll win the bid with $52
You bid $100. It shows as $12. A stupid kid comes along, and bids $15. Your bid goes to $17. The kid bids $20. Your bid shows up as $22. After a while the kid bids $80 and your bid shows up as $85. You win and get to pay $85. Or the kid bids $105 and you don't get the item.
Now if you set up a snipe shot of $100 for that auction, the same kid comes along, bids $15 and leaves happily seeing his bid the highest. You win the auction and get the item for $17.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Uh, doesn't Seoul have the highest density of Ph.D.s? Then just ask the local game theorist. English auctions are well understood. The last bid works because of the time constraint. That is, an English Auction without a time constraint always gets the highest price on the market. So, turning it into a time-controlled auction rather than an English auction is key to getting a fair price. By and large, everything I've ever bought from EBay (only 10-20 things) were over-priced for what I got.
MyExperience
I have to admit, I only have experience bidding a few times for an nVidia graphics card. That said, my take on how sniping is successful is that the number of bids is listed right there for everyone to see. In a list of many different brands of the same card, it's tough to tell which one you want. But it becomes easier to pick one when you see what other people want. The ones with 2 or 3 bids look more valuable than the ones with zero bids.
In my case, I bid on 4 different cards that had zero bids after 1 of 3 days. Within hours of my bids, each item would get a second bid, beating out what I wanted to pay. Only one of my bids, on the crappiest model, survived until the last day when it was also outbid.
It was especially bad that I bid on a rare-in-America Gainward Gold Seal nVidia, without a box, and with a picture that didn't even look like a graphics card. Nobody would have known what it even was, and definitely wouldn't have known that it was a top end card. After I bid, the bidding suddenly went crazy. Had I waited, it might have gone unnoticed, and at least received fewer bidders, if not lower bids. Instead the card went for several hundred dollars and over 10 bids.
It's a pretty standard finding. Bidder strategies will adjust to any changes in auction formats.
Standard English auctions, Dutch auctions, first price sealed bid auctions, second price sealed bid auctions all end up at pretty much the same price - they just get there by a different route. But English auctions (as well as second price sealed bid auctions) generally have the advantage of truthful revelation of valuation by the bidders.
People who bid a certain amount, get outbid, and then go back and bid a higher amount cause this. Everyone should only snipe. It turns ebay into a silent auction. The person with the highest max bid wins. No going back to pay $.50 more. You get one shot and then it's over!
Synergy is your friend
An eBay auction is technically a second-price, or Vickery auction. As long as you bid your value, i.e. what you're willing to pay for the item, you will either get the product for your bid or less, or not get it because someone outbid you (regardless of when that bid came in). Sniping only wins if you bid less than the sniper's bid. If you did indeed bid less than the sniper's bid because it's worth less to you than to the sniper, you shouldn't really care that you didn't win the auction - the item wasn't worth the winning bid to you. If OTOH, you bid less than you were willing to pay for the item, that's because you didn't really understand the way the auction and proxy-bidding works. If that is indeed the case, there's a simple remedy - bid your value. In other words - the system works.
When did I ever say I was "mad?" I am annoyed at the unfairness of the system. Those with lots of time on their hands, especially as bids end, can convert that time to money by sniping. I don't want to be part of that system, so I do not opt in. It doesn't make me mad, it makes me lose, so it makes me go to other places to buy things.
It's not unfair though. There are many systems that will automate sniping for you so you don't have to actually be there. You admit it makes you lose, yet you refuse to change your behavior to the method that is proven to make you win at lower prices than if you proxy bid.
Then why didn't the sniper bid $120 for it when they first saw the item? You can't claim that I'm wrong for not bidding the absolute maximum I was willing to pay for it when I first saw it when the snipers refuse to do the same.
Because the snipers aren't caught up in worrying about how they think the system should work. They've figured out how to take advantage of how it does work and get on with buying things at a good price. You're right. If there was no emotional involvement everyone would put their maximum bid in early and wait to see what happens. As it is though, with many days to mull it over and each add another dollar or two to their maximum bid, putting in what you would like to pay more often than not ends up in losing the auction, or overpaying to win.
Yeah, I do. $100 shit sells for $200. I go to Amazon and buy it for $100 there with free shipping, and I don't have to use PalPal. If I wanted to collect things, eBay is great for finding one-of-a-kinds, but to buy barely used common items, I have rarely seen a bargain in the last few years. Even the snipers are stupid. I think they think "if he's willing to pay $180 for it and there's 5 days left on the auction, it must be worth $200" and so goes the dumb sniper...
I agree. I've known ebay was a seller's market for over 8 years now. When I was still in college I made a decent amount of extra money on the side picking off things that were overlooked and re-marketing them better. I bought them low and then re-sold them to people by targeting their non-rational sides. Guess what...it works. I sometimes had people calling me AFTER the auction was over and arranging to pay off the winning bidder to buy from me at a higher price! I haven't done anything other than win auctions by sniping and I'll guarantee I've never even come close to overpaying.I really don't see what the problem is.
:)
When I snipe an item I put in a reserve of how much I'm willing to pay for it [which can often be a fair bit over the current displayed bid] and hit submit about 2 seconds before auction expiry. I synch my PC with a SNTP server, and check the time stamp of an ebay page to estimate my current latency, etc. etc.
Now, if my bid is less than the reserve of the current high bidder, well in that case I wasn't going to get it anyway. If not, the seller gets to enjoy my higher bid.
What I see is that the average sheep^H^H^H^Hbidders just can't make up their mind. They keep increasing their bids. It's as if to say, oh, I'm willing to give $10 more for it now. Does that mean that they've come to the conclusion that since someone else is bidding, the item suddenly increased in value?
You see some bids going to above retail as some people get so worked up with their ever increasing bids, and ny reason for sniping is that I don't want to get entangled in that mess.
Plus I must admit that there's a also a bit of fun to it. Of my snipes, none are worse than 5 second ones and best was a 1 - average is 2 or 3. Never missed one to latency, it's all about timing it - and all my snipes are manual.
ISO certified == THX certified
Yeah, but I don't want to pay the maximum amount of money I'm willing to pay, I want to pay the minimum amount I can get away with.
If everyone does proxy bidding, you end up paying one dollar more than what anyone else was willing to pay. If everyone snipes, you end up paying $1 more than what the next guy thought he could get away with.
While a little off-topic, it seems you can discern the pattern of the buyer aside from the sniping aspect. (i.e. when to catch them sniping most).
Others also recognize other patterns that net them the most per item sold, by doing things such as splitting up china sets into constituent part, only selling birthstones in the months they are applicable, etc.
Ok, let's say I feel like paying $20 and bid $20 early. Then some newbie retard (ebay is full of them) comes and says, "Hmm, that guy thinks it's worth $20, so I'll pay $25". Ok, I've now just lost the item.
I'm amazed at how many posts there are like this one (I don't mean to pick on parent specifically here). Proxy bidding is not that complicated. If you feel like paying $20 for the item you will lose to someone who feels like paying $25 for the item. This is the case with any auction regardless of the timing of the bids.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Now if you set up a snipe shot of $100 for that auction, the same kid comes along, bids $15 and leaves happily seeing his bid the highest. You win the auction and get the item for $17.
You still don't understand proxy bidding. The parent did an excellent job explaining it. Reread the parent and think about how your contention, particularly the section emphasized, does not make sense.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
uh, also to buy stuff that isn't elsewhere. lots of stuff on auction sites is rare or one of a kind.
ôó
Nope. It didnt change. What you forgot to take into account is the fact that people arent computers. They dont bid their maximum. Most of the time they dont even know their absolute maximum.
Okay, then explain to me this:
Every "good deal" I have ever had on ebay came with a snipe bid.
I've made some bad bids before. And some good bids. But no good bid that was placed 2 hours or more before the end of the item's auction has ever won. Those same "good" bids have won if placed less than 10 seconds before the end of auction. If I snipe I often pay *less* than I was willing to pay, but that has never happened when not sniping. I either lose the item, or end up paying more than I should have because I didn't research enough before hand.
There are people who basically "make a living" at playing this game (though I don't know what sort of living you really could make of it). They find the average selling price of an item, and place a snipe bid that is just enough that selling the item for slightly over average will net them positive income after accounting for shipping. If you want to win the auction at a deal, you must out-snipe them. Play the game "rationally" and you will most likely lose.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
Even with such a policy, the shill would only need two accounts to get you within two increments of your maximum.
We've secretly replaced Slashdot with new Folgers Crystals - let's see if it notices.
This is the system used here in New Zealand by Trademe. If there is a higher bid placed in the last 2 minutes, the auction 'auto-extends' by 2 minutes.
This makes sniping pretty much impossible, as if my maximum was $35 and the auction was sitting at $23 and someone came in with 7 seconds to go and tried to snipe at $24, my earlier bid would kick in and they would more than likely be unable to get another shot at it before the 7 seconds expired.
If they came in at 7 seconds to go with a bid of $40, then the auction would extend and I would at least have 2 minutes to decide if I was willing to pay more.
This means it is in your best interests to put in an autobid (aka Proxy Bid) for the maximum you are willing to pay, as it only extends if the bid placed in the last 2 minutes is higher than the current maximum proxy bid and it only bids the minimum necessary amount for you to reach the reserve price/lead the bidding
There is an even easier fix: bid what you would be willing to pay for the item, and let the proxy bidding take care of the rest.
If you get sniped, it will only be because the sniper was willing to pay more than you.
i forget
eBay just needs to ban the AWP n00bs.
So, if you like to snipe, you will easily win if no one else in that auction has set up a proxy. What I don't know (does anyone?) is what percentage of auctions are actually won by a bid that was placed via proxy, and what percentage of bidders have never used a proxy.
The single biggest reason for using a sniper on eBay is that it removes the emotion aspect. Let's say you bid $20 on something, and someone else a little bit later bids $22 max. You then say, well, heck, it's only $5 more, so you bid $25 now. This can go on for quite awhile. By loading it into a sniper and setting logically how much you are willing to pay, you lay down your cards at the end you didn't let yourself get caught up into irrational bidding.
The rest of the stuff like convenience, etc, is just icing on the cake. I use super sniper pro from http://www.codingcentre.com/ and it has done good for me, but there are tons others out there that I'm sure work good, both running on your computer or from a site that does it for you. The point is, it lets you tackle eBay buying on your own terms at least and using your brain.
Oups sorry, forgot I was on slashdot
I ment:
1. What are you waiting for?
2. ???
3. PROFITS!!
You go on the auction 5 minutes before end, post your max amount 10 seconds before end and - either get it or not - often you time out till after auction end.
Now - if everyone does it that way and 10+ folks are posting at the last 10 seconds, it becomes a lottery.
The server has a certain processing time and does the bids sequentially - probably doing atomic locks on some auction resources. Well, there is a cutoff time where working off the queue stops - the highest offer wins at that point.
There are delays in bidding of up to 10 seconds at times - maybe they are doing it on purpose - add a random delay of a couple of seconds to every bidder the last 30 seconds before close? Internet does it by default anyway if the net is busy.
If the sellers are unhappy about the price they get - they can enter a minimum bid requirement.
With sniping it's the same auction principle as without - just in a much smaller time frame....
Yeah, he's willing to pay up to 500 bucks, and so getting it at 475 or 150 is good to him. It is. He prefers it to not getting the item at all. But don't ignore the fact that getting it at 150 remains better than getting it at 475, and getting it at 100 remains better still. A strategy that will probably get the item at 100, then, is better than one which will probably get it at 475, even if both strategies are better than not entering the auction at all. "Winning" an auction may be about getting the item for an amount one is willing to pay. But there remain degrees of winning, some better than others.
Make the bid amount double-blind and only allow buyers to place their maximum bid one time. Problem solved.
You still don't understand proxy bidding. The parent did an excellent job explaining it. Reread the parent and think about how your contention, particularly the section emphasized, does not make sense.
I understand proxy bidding as well as you, what you're missing is that many ebay users *don't* understand proxy bidding, and will submit multiple bids in increments, trying to win. The scenario painted by the GP is very common: a naive user submits a bid that is much lower than his actual maximum, and is happy to leave that low bid as long as it's winning, expecting that if someone outbids him, he'll have a chance to increase his bid. Another bidder who wants to get the item, cheaply, is better off sniping against such a naive user. Submitting a proxy bid may get the item, but at a higher price than sniping.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Your logic is flawless but I have one ethical caveat, what kind of people does it make us that we put so much thought in to how to "compete" in an e-bay auction? Is all of our mountains of junk really worth the mean spirited get it at all costs attitude it produces? What if we put this ingenuity into saving the sick and hungry of the world or solving our fossil addiction here in the U.S.? It seems that Bill Gates of all people has learned this lesson though in the imperfect way common to all us humans. Can the rest of us geeks rise to nurturing our better impulses and not mere raw rank greed?
Although I am not personally religious I agree with the Catholics and Buddhists that avarice is corrupting to the soul or psyche if you want to use a more scientific term:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avarice
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
No. The kid in the story doesn't understand proxy bidding. That's the point. Sniping allows people who understand the system to win auctions at a lower price, since it bypasses those who don't understand the system.
Be glad that you learned something today and stop arguing the same point. The entire point of this article is that a study shows that sniping works best.
I dont run a business on ebay, but I collect computer junk from friends and relatives, and buy things when I seem them for free or near free with rebates (Black Friday). I used to use ebay to get rid of the old stuff , stuff I replaced, or stuff that I bought and never used. Always made a profit, but it was such a pain. Then I found craigslist. I simply look up the avg selling price on ebay, and price accordingly on craigslist. Almost everything I have put up sold in 2 weeks, the rest took a few more weeks. No fees, free pictures, NO SHIPPING since its all local.
I dont think I will ever use ebay to sell something again. It's just too much trouble for all the fees and shipping costs.
I snipe all the time because it is so obviously the best strategy to get the lowest price possible on any particular item, given the current ebay auction rules. It works about 50% of the time in my experience (i.e. it was clear that I won the auction with a lower price even when another bidder would have bid a higher price but couldn't because time ran out).
Given this, it is also obvious that to permit sniping means that many items are NOT sold for the highest price that someone was willing to bid (but couldn't because time ran out). That means that sniping favors *bidders*, not sellers, and therefore not ebay (which makes more money on if the final price is higher). So then why does ebay permit sniping ? Its current rules *encourage* sniping. It would be so easy to abolish sniping by simply (as other auctions do) making the ending time a "soft" deadline that gets extended (by say 10 minutes or more) every time a new bid comes in close to the end time. This solves the sniping problem. (It is only a problem for ebay and sellers. Bidders should be happy that it is possible to snipe).
Why does ebay permit/encourage sniping ?
Someone with serious muscle and money needs to step up and lay the smackdown on Ebay... *cough cough* google *cough* microsoft
Well, they're not auction sites exactly but...
Windows Live Expo Beta
Windows Live Shopping Beta
"Bother," said Pooh, as lightning knocked out hi%#&(F*@NO CARRIER
Obviously getting the item at a lower price is better. That, however, is not the point. Deciding the max you wish to spend ahead of time, bidding that, and allowing the ebay proxy bidding system to take over ensures that you always get a good deal. It's the incremental bidding that the poster describes that ensures the item goes for the highest price and provides the most frustration for getting sniped.
In my book, my maximum price means I won't feel bad about the purchase afterwards. The original poster stated they would pay $500 but would feel bad if they paid $475 while the others went for $100. By my definition, and I'd wager most others you've paid over the max if you feel bad about the purchase afterwards.
Basically there's two types of purchases on ebay. The first is common items, for which you can pick a max and bid until you win. The second is rare items that you really want. In both cases bidding the max price you're willing to pay ensures you'll find the best value with the least amount of frustration.
In the early days of ebay it was so easy to retract that someone would put in a low ball bid with one account, put in a high as hell one with another, and then retract that latter seconds before the auction ended.
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
Maybe these researchers could look at things from a seller's perspective and explore the following question:
-- Is it best to set the starting bid on an item to what you expect it to sell for, or to start it at a ridiculously
low price to get a bidding war going?
Back when I was selling items on eBay, I got the impression that the latter strategy worked best for comodity items that were also for sale by other auctioneers. If I started, say, a graphics card at one cent, people would look at my listing rather than the one from the guy who was starting it at say, $20, which was the minimum I hoped to get. In the end, it seemed that people would pay more for my item, since once they got into the heat of the bidding war, there were more likely to pay more than they intended. This also seemed to help with snipers, since it encouraged so many people to participate in the bidding war that at the end snipers were out-sniping each other.
Of course, this strategy can backfire if only one person wants your item, then you end up selling it at a loss, but you can very easily look at sales history to avoid that.
-- Marcio
For someone who claims to have a system for winning bids with the least frustration, you seem to be frustrated.
Sniping is a perfectly valid strategy because eBay doesn't have an option to bid on multiple auctions and have a 'bid up to $500 on this auction unless I win this auction for less than $300, in which case don't bid on the other auction'. Such a system would be complicated and unworkable. Instead of designing a complicated proxying system, you can snipe instead. The 'bid once' strategy assumes that there is only one company and only one auction and that the supply/demand/price of the item you want will be stable throughout the duration of the bidding, and that you will not change your mind later. Sniping gives maximum flexibility and it does not exclude 'bidding once at your maximum', it just delays the bid until the last moment, whilst giving maximum flexibility to the sniper (at the cost of being a very slightly more complicated system).
Please do use your system, but learn to live with other people using other perfectly valid systems.
If someone is getting frustrating by snipers, it is *them* that is using the wrong system (or else they are just taking things too seriously).
I'll probably be modded down for this...
I think a reasonable compromise is to lock the bidding on an item a period of time before the end of the auction, say 12-24 hours before the end. No one except people who already bid on the auction can bid after this point. This isn't unreasonable since auctions last considerably longer than the proposed lockin period.
If you were the only one to bid on an item, the you would get it at that point. Otherwise, anyone who made a bid would be allowed to rebid (and snipe) on the item up to the deadline. Sniping still gives an advantage both in the pre-lock period and the post-lock period, but the sniper has to reveal their interest in the auction before the locking deadline. And if you see a well-known sniper is bidding for an item, then you at least know what to expect.Previous posts have discussed some of the reasons why sniping works and is the best strategy for the vigilant bidder. One of the additional factors that I haven't seen mention is the fact that in most cases, one's "maximum bid" is rarely a true maximum bid. This is in part because people go to ebay expecting a good deal. If you simply expected to pay retail prices, most people wouldn't bother with ebay (expect at Xmas time for newly released toy/products). If there is an item that you would say you'd be willing to bid "up to" $100 on, you do so generally thinking that even at $100, it would still be a "good deal". But what that means is that if you were asked to pay $100.01, you almost certainly think that was just about as good a deal. Probably even at $105.99 you would still go for it. But that is not the question that is asked of normal bidders who bid early with their "maximum bid". The current ebay rules don't allow you to answer that question with early bids. Only snipers can operate in the mode where they can adjust their "maximum bids" to their *true* maximum bids.
ebay needs to change their rules to get rid of sniping so as to get higher true bids and better final pricing for their sellers (unless ebay has already modeled the system and concluded that the total net income would go down due to less happy bidders/snipers).
OT: another thing that I am amazed that ebay puts up with are those ridiculous $0.01 auctions where the real value/cost of the product is shifted to the "shipping and handling" costs (and sometimes even the mandatory "insurance fees"), such that ebay itself is scammed out of its fair cut and the buyers are left vulnerable (and often misled). Vulnerable because "shipping and handling" and "insurance" are never refunded: "oh you never got the item, well ok, here is your money back: $0.01"...
I love the $10 mandatory insurance for the item that costs $0.01. (not!)
Reserve price auctions are a good tool for sellers to find out what the market is actually willing to pay for a given item, while not risking having to sell below the seller's preceived value of the item.
If the seller wants to find out whether their perceived value of the item is too high or not, they should simply make the auction start at that very value. If it's too high, the article will not sell. If it sells, it's not under value as the auction started at the perceived value. Simple and fair. A starting price below what the seller is willing to sell for makes no sense - if you don't want to sell below $100, then don't offer your item below $100.
Sniping works when people don't actually know what something is worth. Every time you make a bid, you literally raise the price of the item: you declare that it's worth at least this much to you.
Exactly - when people don't know what the item is worth, the current bid is what people think it's worth. I recently sold a car on ebay, and I hoped and prayed for people to bid early and often. This raises the perceived value, and lets the snipers come in at the last 5 minutes and move up from there. This is why shill bidding is outlawed -- it really works. If I could have (legally) run up the auction with 30 bids, I would have. Bump up the price some, still keep it somewhat reasonable, and make it look like there's all kinds of interest. Instead, I inserted lots of pictures, responded to every (not-stupid) question publically, and kept adding content throughout the auction. Keep people interested. I even added a video.
From a seller's perspective, I would really like the "new bid, auction extends for another 1 or 5 minutes idea. That puts the snipers in place, and lets my auction drag on & on while people are bidding. Love it. Oh well.
Look for misspelled items. This relies on 2 simple truths:
h eap_mis.html
1) A lot of sellers either aren't too good at English or aren't too good at proofreading
2) Most searches performed for items on eBay are spelled correctly
If you look for the misspelled items, they'll be the least viewed ones, and hence the ones with the fewest bids, hence having the lowest prices.
This tip stolen from Boing Boing: http://www.boingboing.net/2005/10/16/search_for_c
The real solution is to make all of ebay sealed second-place bidding style. That way you can bid early and it's just as good as a snipe. The extreme length of time and lack of real-time bidding makes English proxy bidding an awful solution.
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
If my item have not day before reasonable price i take it away. What doesnt start on 1USD have no views but i am not willing to sell notebook for 1 euro to some crazy sniper
Here goes your sniping
Life is a stamina war, and we all lose eventually. Sometimes you actually have to work in order to reap rewards.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
"Now if you set up a snipe shot of $100 for that auction, the same kid comes along, bids $15 and leaves happily seeing his bid the highest. You win the auction and get the item for $17."
However your Internet connection drops out / you have computer problems / EBay has emergency maintenance, you miss your snipe window and are too late to bid on the item. The kid gets it for $15, and you get nothing.
The other problem with this, is that it assumes you are the only person performing last minute bids (AKA sniping, what a stupid term).
"Sniping" simply compresses the time frame for a bidding war to the last few minutes. The usefulness for this practice (Which feels like cheating to me) approaches zero as it becomes more common. While the probability of your bid not being accepted increases as the end date approaches.
Also the first bid of the same amount wins. If someone bid $10, then someone bids $100, the amount goes to $12, the kid then bids $15, you snipe at $100, but the previous bid of $100 still wins.
In your attempt to solve one problem, you've created others.
That was a really clear explanation. Thanks :)
---
Why are you bidding on auctions at all, with that attitude?
Because I want a good deal on something I want. Isn't that why everyone is there?
You bid what you're willing to pay.
But that isn't the same as "what it is worth," which is your previous standard. And what I'm willing to pay and what I want to pay will never match. Why should I bid what I want to pay (different from what you said I should bid) then watch the bid for the next few days, then have the bid "stolen" in the last few seconds by a sniper that doesn't follow your instructions? After all, snipers, by definition, don't follow your directions. If they don't play by your rules, and they win more auctions, why should I take your advice? It seems to be a recipe for losing and frustration, according the the "experts" yet you are here asserting that I'm wrong. So, not only do I know your suggestion fails to win auctions, I now have the article in question confirming my findings. So, why should I listen to you? No, really. I'm confused. Tell me how following your directions and losing to snipers will help me get what I want at the price I want. It will help me never pay more than I want to pay, but it won't help me get the things I want. It seems the only "solution" to sniping is to join them. That seems to be the opposite of your directions. I have a better chance of getting what I want for what I want if I don't bid like you say, but instead become a sniper. Of course, I value my time more than just hoving around the computer waiting for auctions to almost end to bid in the last few seconds. So I'll stick to sites like Amazon. Cheaper than eBay for lots of stuff, and it is on my doorstep before the eBay auction even ends (and free shipping, not having to use PayPal, and the thing in the box being exactly what I order).
Learn to love Alaska
I agree that this is a serious problem. It's also easy to solve.
Instead of giving an exact time for the auction's end, give a fuzzy time (This auction will end in 3 days). Then, on the last day, never give an exact time (This auction will end between 1:30pm and 2:00pm), where 1:30 would have been the time you had initially posted the item for sale. You get a few free minutes of publicity on your item, and nobody knows when the auction ends, which would change sniping into a matter of pure luck.
It's not unfair though. There are many systems that will automate sniping for you so you don't have to actually be there.
Hahahaha. Are you serious? That's like claiming that cutting people off in traffic is fair because they can go out and cut someone else off. Just because I could do it doesn't make it fair. I think you need to discover the meaning of the word "fair." Oh, and if it were an intended bidding method, where is the "snipe" configuration page on eBay? I can't find it.
Learn to love Alaska
That could extend the auction indefinitely. How about this variation on your idea:
The end of the auction is at the stated time, but with a plus or minus 5 minute "random window". This would massively reduce the scope for effective sniping. Sniping is only effective because you KNOW when the last coupla' second is.
BugBear
Ignorance is curable. Stupid is forever.
The language you use sums it up perfectly. It's all about beating people and "winning" auctions. You don't win squat, you pay for it. :-) Nice marketing move from eBay. Everyones a winner!
Remember, ebay don't care too much about the final price, it doesn't affect their fees too much - what matters to them is getting as many auctions processed as possible, with the least amount of bandwidth and CPU cycles used to minimise their running costs.
Ebay have at various times been requested to add a "this is a scam" button, so that if enough independent people "vote" for it, they will act... but they don't care enough to do that sort of thing - you have to email scam@ebay.com or spoof@ebay.com to report bogus deals.
NO.
You are committing the Heap fallacy - the idea that you can define when a pile of grains becomes a heap.
Here we will use the word 'worth' to indicate what a person thinks they would happily pay for an item.
You think that if someone decides that an item is worth $100 then it is not worth $101. This is not the case. The value is actually 'smeared out' like a quantum object (Hey, maybe it is quantum - idea for an economics PhD?).
That is why I will snipe at $104.69. The object is worth around $100, so the bidding goes like this:
Inexperienced Joe will bid $80 with a day to go, hoping for a bargain.
Tom, who has read the instructions, bids $100 with a day to go, because that is what he would be happy to pay
Dick, with a bit of practice, snipes $101, since he accurately guesses that the item is on $81 because another bidder is bidding in round numbers
Harry, with a lot of practice, expects a sniper, and snipes $103.45, guessing that the sniper will look to go just over.
Harry gets the item at $102, which, as I have indicated earlier, is equal to $100. He has behaved perfectly rationally.
You can make this behaviour less likely to succeed in two ways: either automatically extend the end of the auction, or require the bids to increase in larger jumps. This last already happens, but the jumps are not really large enough.
Sniping is the way to do it, not because it's the best way to conduct an auction (it isn't, for either the seller or the buyer) but because many of the bidders you're up against bid stupidly. If everyone bid sensibly and logically according to the system, and everyone believed that everyone else also bid sensibly and logically, there would be no point to sniping. But that's not how life works, for anything.
The only time not to snipe is when its simply not worth the effort ensuring you're online at the right time.
Really smart buyers do not get emotionally attached to the auction, and let the proxy do all the work.
And now you see why sellers love sniping.
chown -R us
Nonsense. If I want it at £20, I will be happy to pay £20.01p. Hell, I would be happy to pay £20.22p.
I would be less happy to pay £21. And if someone bids £22 I reckon they won it fair and square.
Your problem is that you think that £20.01 is more then £20.00. This may be true in the classroom, but it is NOT true in real life.
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Prairiewest is not very intelligent. I'd like to bid against him in an auction - he doesn't seem to understand what we're talking about.
There is no magic 'maximum price you are willing to pay'. Would Prairiewest pay $746.87 for a laptop but not $746.88? If so, he knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing!
Sniping works because you don't want the auction you are interested in to be a competition. If you have to have something, use "buy it now" or go to a store. If you don't believe it can become a competition, please explain the behavior of bidders who are bidding more for an item than the "buy it now" price in a dozen other auctions for the same item with comparable seller feedback and shipping costs? BTW with the good sniping software that is available, I don't have to get up in the middle of the night to watch my auctions either. I can set the max I am willing to pay and select multiple auctions. The software will snipe until I win one, then quit. Best to avoid two auctions that end too closely though unless you have to, just in case.
I'm used to tradme.co.nz, where bids are (by default) "auto bids". It seems it's the same as eBay's "proxy" bids. In this system, if I bid $110, only the lowest possible 'next bid' appears as my bid. Whenever another bid is made, eBay will automatically place a bid on my behalf up to $110. Importantly, though, that $110 is *not visible* to anyone else.
So, if the price was currently $50, and I do a proxy bid of $110, all they see is a bid of $51. A sniper comes along with $52, but the proxy bid will take it at $53. A sniper, to beat me, would have to know that I did a proxy bid of $110 - information that they do NOT have access to.
Tradme.co.nz has another feature that helps defeat sniping - virtually all auctions will automatically extend by five minutes if a bid is placed in the last five minutes. Thus, there is no "last second" to make the bid in.
It's all about the money.
If the sniper goes over what I bid, good for him. He paid more than I was willing to. Don't see what the big deal is. I've never lost an auction where I was willing to pay what the sniper paid.
- "That's just the kind of fuzzy-headed liberal thinking that leads to being eaten."
Sniping works against those who don't understand eBay.
I think there's two types of people commenting on here: those who don't understand eBay, and those who don't understand human psychology.
If someone bids $100 as their max bid, and they get sniped at the last minute by someone who bids $100.05, well surely they originally thought their max bid would be $100, but what's the harm in throwing in an extra 10 cents to win the auction?
I think most people would pay the extra 10 cents if that means they could win the auction. Maybe they wouldn't pay an extra dollar, or ten or twenty (but I'm sure some people would be willing to throw in that extra money to win.)
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
Are you serious? Why should we care about the other 95% of the world when we don't have to? I sell in only America, that works great for me, where's my incentive to sell to you or anyone else outside of the US? And like they mentioned, too much fraud doing it internationally. So lots of reasons NOT to sell to the "other 95%" and not a whole lot for it. You don't like it? Get more people in your country to do Ebay, or come here (but please do it legally, we've got enough illegal aliens to make us closer to 10% of the world...) but don't try and make us care about the other 95% of the world when it comes to freaking Ebay...
Did I win?
eBay uses proxy bidding; you can't see what the current high bidder's maximum bid is. If the current price is at $20 and you bid $21, but a previous bidder specified a maximum proxy bid of $30, you won't be the new high bidder; the previous high bidder will still be the high bidder and the price will be at ~$22.
> And there is an easy fix: A bid will extend the auction by ~10 minutes
> if received in the last 10 minutes. Voila, no more sniping.
Is there nothing World of Warcraft can't solve?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
With sniping you wouldn't just increase your chance of winning, you'd probably pay less than you would if you bid early with a huge hidden max. Because you wouldn't be adding to the runup.
When I read this article, I thought the core concept was stupid, until I realized they were talking about early bidding vs. sniping, not a combination of the two. But then I realized you'd probably pay less if you just sniped, while having just as good a chance of winning as the early + snipe combo.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
> Really smart buyers do not get emotionally attached to the auction, and let the proxy do all the work.
And they mostly lose the auctions, which is the point of the article.
And what you think is the max you'll pay may not be when you realize you're not gonna actually win it. There's a bid difference between bidding on RAM for a 10 year old computer and bidding on that 10 year old magazine with Christy Turlington on the cover looking just so.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I'm amazed at how many people can't see further than the end of their nose.
The point is not that two people independently decided that an item was worth $20 or $25. The point was that the second DECIDED to bid $25 AFTER seeing the first bid of $20. If you think the two events are isolated presumably you would bid $20 on an item which was already at $25, and then wait to see if you won it!
I will explain the point again for those of us who have trouble understanding things:
When you bid, you provide information to a competitor about the minimum price they will have to pay to beat you. That also encourages the competitor to 'raise the bar'. It is in your interest to hide that information as long as possible - ideally until it is too late for your competitor to make use of it. That is why you snipe.
Imagine two armies about to have a battle. According to your philosophy, each side counts the other's troops, and one side agrees that it must be beaten because the other side has more soldiers. In reality, you conceal your forces, move them around, and make your attack if you can with more men at the critical point, giving your enemy no time to re-inforce with his extra men.
That's actually quite a good analogy, because battles are quite often won by the weaker side manoevering better, or the stronger side making a basic mistake and manoevering worse. You can do exactly the same with your bid.
So you can win if you are willing to spend $20 against someone willing to spend $25. It depends if you manoever correctly, and if they make a mistake.
Signed - "The Napoleon of E-Bay"
The "setting your maximum bid ensures that you get the best possible price so sniping is no problem" people have one flaw in their argument.
Nobody bids on *everything* on eBay. And they pay attention to current prices on the item when they do so. If they simply sat at their computer and assigned prices to things based on how much they want them and never even looked at the current price, then, sure, setting bids would be fine even in the presence of sniping. But many people say "hey, I'll bid on that -- that's a good price". They bid *because* of the current price, which is low.
I can understand why eBay doesn't want to extend the auction -- it kills some of the urgency as time runs out and it may be more difficult for the seller.
Perhaps if the minimum increment started increasing after the time runs out, so that people don't keep bumping up the price by some minimum amount -- for example, if each person had to double the previous increment to continue beyond time running out. "Overtime" is exciting in sports, right?
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
I don't deal with international buyers or sellers because the chance for fraud is simply too great. Not that it can't happen in the United States, but at least if something goes wrong we can at least alert Police about the incident and can get banks involved. Once you step outside the boundaries of the United States, local law enforcement don't want to (or can't) get involved.
See, that is exactly the reason why I only sell stuff to foreign countries.
This is not necessarily a good idea. I am tired of 'helping' people to see the difficulties with ideas as mich as the advantages.
With this one, we will still have sniping at the end of each 10 minutes slot. Only it will be for penny increases.
If I see an item at £10 that is worth £50 to me, I might put a bid of £20 in. At the last minute I get sniped by someone offering £21.82. Under this new regime, I now get the chance to bid up in, say, 10p increments until I am at £21.90. Now I am ready for the sniper, and watch him bid in £21.95. I promptly bid £21.96; he follows with £21.97. This goes on for as long as we want to keep it up, and with penny increases it can go on a long time.
Good for the seller, but so much trouble that I suspect e-bay will loose a lot of buyers, for whom the thrill of the hunt is everything.
This has more to do with the fuzzy nature of peoples' maximum bids. The solution to that is to have larger bid increments, like real auctions do. It's kind of stupid to allow people to bid pennies over someone else's bid, because it just feeds this type of behavior. If the average person knows that their maximum is ~$500, and that they wouldn't go as high as $525, maybe a $10 or a $25 bid increment is appropriate.
I tend to do the fire-and-forget thing. I set my maximum, and if I'm out-bid, then oh well. It's more amusement to me to watch people jump all over the bid in the last 30-60 seconds of the auction. Their time must not be worth very much.
Bidding, which other users can see, will force the final sale price up. That's pretty obviously not in the best interest of the buyer.
Disclosing what you're willing to pay for an item will allow anyone else to out-bid you. That's also an obvious disadvantage for the buyer.
Waiting until the last moment to make a single bid is like a secret bidding process. It eliminates the preliminary competition and lets people bid based on what they would feel comfortable paying for the item. Everyone knows that other people will be bidding too, so they will tend to be generous with their bid in proportion to the amount of competition they imagine there will be.
Does e-bay already offer a "secret bid" auction? I think that would be the best system.
How aggravating would that "fix" be? The real answer is to use an external sniping service and let the fools who will not pay for their idiocy. The eBay proxy bidding system is DESIGNED to vicitimize those who use it the moment a smarter person snipes them. The practice of external sniping proxy use actually delivers the bidding mode eBay promises and knowingly fails to deliver.
tone
tone
Considering that Ebay has set the rules, and sniping is within them, sniping obviously fits that part of the definition. I'm not sure logic really applies here, and as for ethics, considering that anybody can snipe merely by choosing to do so, I don't even see an ethical problem there.
(Now, if only certain people could snipe, then I might agree that it's unfair. But that's not the case.)
So yes, I think I understand the word just fine.
That's why you only sell on Ebay.
It seems that there is confusion here because people believe the item is the only thing being bid upon. In reality, "winning" is a good that has value for people too (usually in the form of a drug release in their brain). When you bid, some other bidder (especially one that has already bid) values beating you enough to change their max bid. Though their original bid accounted for their maximum value of the item, it also accounted for the satisfaction of winning. Now that you have bid, the threat of disappointment makes the value of winning higher, and hence, they raise their bid. The value of sniping is in overcoming the slow response of these human participants to this induced demand. In effect, if everyone used a sniping program set to their max bid, then we would be back to bidding only for the value of the item (and our joy of winning the item, but not of beating another participant).
If I really want something I do both, but I only make a small initial bid, say a max of half what I am willing to pay tops, just in case everyone else somehow misses the auction AND my sniper fails - which has happened before. I've never won an auction without sniping like that though. Usually people only miss auctions which are both in the wrong category and have a stupid title.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Regarding the final price, sniping only works if there are non-rational bidders.
Actually, there are other conditions that give value to sniping.
Like far too many people who work in economics, most of the discussion here has neglected analysis of information costs. If you place a proxy bid Ebay style, that gives information to other market players about what you are willing to pay; same thing when they bid. Studying the historical shape of the price curves vs. time, and given the public bid shown after at least five existing proxy bids and at least three hours left, it's not hard to make an estimate of what the winning bid will be... even with snipers. (However, I see no reason to reveal my own calculations about the curve, cf. Seldon's Laws. Yeah, "information wants to be free" and "mother nature protects no secrets"... but if you want the info, do the math yourself.)
It also helps if you understand the meaning of a demand curve. At low prices, there are a lot of people that will be at least casually interested in the item, with low maximum amounts they are willing to pay, and who do not wish to waste their time on bidding. In the Ebay community, many such people will bid casually on items they don't seriously expect to get. (I've bid on a couple desktop computers that were under $100 on this basis, and came suprisingly close to winning one.) This helps insure that there is often enough information to make reasonable projections.
There's also the value of time, both time-importance of an item, and the value placed on the bidder's time. Of course, since (barring Christmastime) there usually isn't major day-to-day variation in the demand curve for an item, similar projections can be made for more common items by examining completed sales data. The proxy-bid history curve is most useful for highly unusual or seldom-sold items (how much can you expect to pay for a collection of antique glass eyes?), or when trying to figure out if sniping will cause enough increase at the end of auction to be worth altering your own bid time.
I swear, it ought to be possible to get at least a couple dozen good doctoral theses out of analyzing the pricing data Ebay generates, even without doing experimental selling.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
What are you? some kinda Sith Lord or something.
Because I want a good deal on something I want. Isn't that why everyone is there?
Not really. Auctions are only going to get you good deals if not many other people are interested in buying the item. If lots of people want it, the price is going to skyrocket damn quick, whether you're using Ebay or a real life auction.
But that isn't the same as "what it is worth," which is your previous standard.
You bid what you're willing to pay, which is what it's worth to you. It's an equivalent concept.
Why should I bid what I want to pay (different from what you said I should bid) then watch the bid for the next few days, then have the bid "stolen" in the last few seconds by a sniper that doesn't follow your instructions? After all, snipers, by definition, don't follow your directions. If they don't play by your rules, and they win more auctions, why should I take your advice? It seems to be a recipe for losing and frustration, according the the "experts" yet you are here asserting that I'm wrong. So, not only do I know your suggestion fails to win auctions, I now have the article in question confirming my findings.
If you bid the maximum that you're willing to pay, and lose in the last 5 seconds, you didn't lose because of sniping. You lost because someone else was willing to pay more than you were, which is how auctions are supposed to work. If you're saying that you would have gone back and outbid them again if you'd had time, then you obviously aren't bidding the maximum you're willing to pay from the start. The article is wrong, or at least misguided, in that it only affects early bidders who do NOT place their maximum bid, but instead try to bid manually. If you set an absolute maximum bid, one where you absolutely couldn't stand to pay any more for the item, and someone outbids you, it doesn't matter if they outbid you 3 days or 3 seconds before the auction ends, you still lose. You're blaming sniping for something that's just the way normal auctions work, and so are these researchers.
So I'll stick to sites like Amazon. Cheaper than eBay for lots of stuff, and it is on my doorstep before the eBay auction even ends (and free shipping, not having to use PayPal, and the thing in the box being exactly what I order).
I've already expressed my opinion of people who buy mass-market items on Ebay. I just don't see the point. If you were using Ebay for that in the first place, no wonder you seem jaded towards them.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
From eBay's perspective they've already captured the listing fee, and the 10-20% movement in price achieved by extending the auction nets them (eBay) only a few more pennies on their percentage of selling price, so why would they bother? It's the same tension as real-estate agents - they'd rather get a $100,000 sale 10 days into a home's listing than a $120,000 sale 60 days in e.g. a $5000 (assuming 5% commission) at 10 days than $6000 at 60 days.
Maybe for the real-esate agents who are looking for that short-term "get my quick fix" type of gain but, for the agents who are consistently making sales, in the long run, it pays off to get that extra grand on a sale. Sure you'd have to suck it up for the first few months but, eventually, the "lag" of not being paid right away will be gone and it will be worth it.
What if eBay also had another auction type in addition to normal and Buy It Now ones: silent auctions. It tells you when it ends, the seller may optionally give a reccomended amount, and you get to put in your bid, without knowing what anyone else put down. Now you'd be more compelled to put your maximum bid down.
This is how ebay should work.
Look, they DO understand proxy bidding, and that's why they bid up in small increments to feel out the fucking proxy bids. Blind auctions are crap, people want to kow if they're in the game or not - if you just bang in a proxy bid cold you get no feeling for the competition and you expose yourself horribly - so 'feeling' and sniping are the answer.
Don't forget, auction sites LOVE people to overpay, that's what keeps the sellers happy, and they pay the bills.
Setting the minimal bid increase is that bidder's problem. I recently won an auction for a very good price, because the last-minute people were only inching their bids up. I set a good max price with 3.5 minutes remaining. Then three other people come along, just slowing inching their bids by $5-10. In the end, I won the item for about $120 (worth $150-180) with little room to spare on my maximum bid. They wasted time going $20, $30, $40, etc in the final minutes to their own detriment. Due to the item's value, they could have jumped to say $100, and then inched a little bit and would have found my max and outbid me. Instead they hoped (I suppose) to get a steal of a price on the item for $40.
Bid what you're willing to pay. If you get it for less, wonderful. Don't forget to take into account shipping. Just this morning I was browsing for a cheap video card with svideo out for my MythTV box. I saw one dork with a buyitnow price of $9.99, sounds cheap, but $30.99 non-refundable shipping. And that's for a $30 NVidia 5500 card from Newegg. Speaking of which, I'd say shipping whores are a bigger nuisance on ebay than sniping.
Being an avid eBay user for a number of years, I discovered the concept of sniping within 6 months of making my first transaction.
In the early phase, I did it all manually. Set an alarm on the computer 10 -15 minutes before the end of the auction, and then sat at the computer and entered my bid at the last possible moment.
There were a few drawbacks to this approach.
1) I was on a dailup connection, which was slow to send transactions, so I had to send my bid in well in advance of the time that someone could submit their last bid if they were on a broadband connection. The only thing worse than hauling yourself out of bed at 3am to bid on an item is to lose the bid because someone else has a faster connection to the internet than you do.
2) I had to phycially 'be there' to bid on each and every item I was interested in.
3) It was difficult to track similar objects and compare the current bid prices to make sure I was bidding on the correct item, i.e., the one I was most likely to win at the best possible price.
I looked around for sniping programs, tried out a few, and finally settled on my current sniping program. Here's why:
I.) I only pay a fee for the items I actually win. Currently this fee is 2% of the winning bid price. Since I am an agressive bargain hunter, the 2% fee is more than reasonable, since my wining bid prices are frequently low enough to upset a seller now and again.
II.) I can bid on a particular type of item 100 times or more, at no cost to me, until I get one at the bargain price I am searching for.
III.) Bid grouping.(The BIGGIE)
a) Let's say I've decided I want a gold plated whatchamacallit. In the next week, there are 14 of them coming up for bid. I've done my research, and I've discovered that these sell for about $42 on eBay, and about $8 shipping for a total of $50 delivered. I've also noted that a few folks have managed to get them for as little as $35, and one chap got lucky and got one for $27.
b) I check and find that I can purchase one of these items from an alternate source, local or online, for about $75-80.
c) Since I want the best possible deal I can get, I decide that I am willing to pay $27 + $8 shipping, for a total delivered price of $35. This is a huge goal, to get one of these for less than half of what they normally sell for, but, I am patient, and I never fall in love with any particular item. Price is always the central issue.
d) I seach the current listings for items, and now I am ready to start loading my bids into the sniper program. Since the goal is to get the item delivered to my door for $35, all bids are adjusted according to shipping costs. If a seller, like so many do, charges significantly higher shipping costs (in order to 'pad' the final selling price, and cheat eBay out of the appropriate seller fees) then the shipping fees that will be deducted from my $35 total cost goal will be higher than the shipping fees deducted from the bid that will be placed on the item listed by a seller who is charging a modest $6.50 for shipping.
e) After loading the sniper with all of the listings, and adjusting the bids so that the final cost to me is no more than $35, I tell the sniper program I want it to bid on each item as it becomes available until I win 1 (or 2, or 3, or however many I want at this price).
f) I go back to my daily life and let the sniper do the work. I will get email notifications that this item or that has gone beyond my bid price. These emails are ignored. I only want the item at the price previously determined. If someone else wants to pay more, god bless them, I'll wait.
g) Eventually one of two things will happen. I will win the item at the price I have set, or, I may have to add more items to the sniping group and keep on trying. After reloading the sniping group a couple of times without a win, if I really want the item, I may have to reset my concept of what I can reasonably expect
Differences between how you act when some one is watching, and how you act when no one is watching, define who you are
Wouldn't someone interested in defrauding the system still have his friend run up the price an hour or two before the end of the auction to catch the snipers? I mean it's not like he actually has to sell the thing, and he's only out his Ebay fees (which do add up after awhile).
I read the internet for the articles.
Well stated, Mr./Ms. Coward. Incremental bidders (those who don't understand eBay's proxy bidding) are the reason sniping works best. If people were to actually read and follow eBay's instructions -- which are not exactly hidden -- they'd enter their maximum as soon as they made the decision to bid. Many eBay users apparently just don't understand that when you enter your "Maximum Bid," it's not the same as yelling out a price at a real-world auction. It doesn't necessarily raise the current bid to that level; it just tells the system how high to bid if someone else tries to raise near that amount. The system automatically executes incremental bids on your behalf. Doing it yourself is a waste of effort!
It's amusing to look at eBay item bidding histories and see how, for instance, one person entered eleven bids in a row, trying to notch up the price juuuuust a little more, only to discover on the first ten tries that someone else's proxy bid automatically topped them. I wonder what's going through their mind: Curses! Every time I raise the bid, this sonofabitch is right on top of me, out-bidding me a nanosecond later!
I always snipe, because there are always incremental bidders around. Sniping doesn't pull an end-run around anyone who entered a larger proxy bid; it just avoids the...hmm...yes, I think I can justifiably say clueless others who try to chip away instead of following directions. (And with that cluelessness sometimes comes a truckload of indignation. My wife, another veteran sniper, has gotten such nasty emails from other bidders -- "That was totally unfair...I'm reporting you to eBay...You'd better not do that again, because I'm watching you...")
Which site was it that implemented an automatic 10-minute extension after each last-minute bid? Yahoo? Amazon? That's a seller's dream -- sniping is impossible, so everybody gets to duke it out until they're tired. Buyer's nightmare, though, so I stayed away from those.
Well stated! If I could mod you over 5, I would.
as for ethics, considering that anybody can snipe merely by choosing to do so, I don't even see an ethical problem there.
And everyone could commit murder, if they wanted, so then murder must be ethical.
So yes, I think I understand the word just fine.
Well, you managed to read the definition without a problem, but I think we might have an issue with "if anyone can do it, it must be ethical" stance you have. Fairness and ethics are intertwined, and I'm not sure you have ethics figured out. I could name a long list of items our government has declared are "within the rules" (such as indefinate detainment of non combatants in Cuba) that there seems to be some debat as to whether the actions are fair or ethical. I should point everyone discussing it to you. "Dougmc says that it must be fair and ethical if it doesn't break the rules."
Learn to love Alaska
That possibility of getting a "good deal," is the real genius of eBay. Without it it's just another take-you-for-all-they-can-get auctioneering service. If eBay stops doing that-- all their competition has to do is *start* doing it and it will steal considerable traffic away from eBay...
You're blaming sniping for something that's just the way normal auctions work, and so are these researchers.
Yes, we are. You seem to be defending sniping, not discussing sniping. I'm guessing you are a sniper that is personally offended that others are discussing the bad points of sniping. More people don't like sniping than do like it. The casual buyers hate it because they feel that bids were "stolen" from them. The sellers don't like it because hiding bids until the last seconds prevents others from bidding more for it, so buyers lose money. The only people that like it are the people who snipe. So, of course it will be looked down upon. It is unpopular and leads to real results like those found in this study.
it doesn't matter if they outbid you 3 days or 3 seconds before the auction ends, you still lose.
If it didn't matter, then why didn't they bid 3 days ago when they first saw the object? Of course, because it does matter, and they know it. If it didn't matter when they bid, the snipers wouldn't snipe. You can't convince me that the timing of the bids and when I get out bid doesn't matter. You know it does, because you know sniping is effective.
Learn to love Alaska
No, YOU don't understand how to snipe. Very few items are actually *rare* on eBay. Miss one, another will come along soon enough. Do your research, find out what the average rate is, figure out what you'd like to pay at LESS than that going rate, then snipe that amount. Don't get it? Snipe the next one. Before long you will get one that's been ignored by enough bidders that you'll get the lowball price. I've often aquired things for far less than the average rate because I'm patient and do not telegraph my interest in advance by bidding early.
When you outbid someone before the close, they get an email which will often prod bidders into thinking-- "can't let this *^$#)$ get away with that, I'll outbid him back."
The ability to snipe is specifically a *bidder friendly* feature that without, eBay would *have* no bidder friendly features, it would all be seller-friendly and IMHO, downright bidder-UNfriendly because of it. It's nice that an auction actually has a bidder friendly feature, even if it wasn't intended to be that originally. It would be a HUGE mistake for them to change that, as they would lose a lot of bidders (myself included)...
NOT INSIGHTFUL AT ALL!
Proxy bidding works, if you're not being cheap!
You obviously don't understand how an auction works... The winner is the one who bids the most, not the one who bids the sneakiest.
How To Win On eBay:
Offer a fair price for something and don't whine and bitch when someone wants to pay more than you.
How is this a "serious" problem?
Are children starving because of it?
Is it going to start a China Syndrome?
Or is it that you can't win that near-mint Jean Luc Picard still in the box that you've always wanted?
Simplify this: eliminate shipping/etc, and suppose the "item" were a ten dollar bill.
If your max bid is 9.99, that means you are interested in making one cent of profit.
Now imagine you raise your max bid by ten cents. Now you are interested in a nine cent loss. Sure, maybe that is a nine cent loss you are willing to take - but why?
You seem to be defending sniping, not discussing sniping. I'm guessing you are a sniper that is personally offended that others are discussing the bad points of sniping.
I've used Ebay five times in my life, and never once sniped. I just think the lot of you are being whiney little bitches.
The casual buyers hate it because they feel that bids were "stolen" from them. The sellers don't like it because hiding bids until the last seconds prevents others from bidding more for it, so buyers lose money.
For the fifth time, this only applies if you don't bid the maximum you're willing to pay up-front. If you DO that, this works like a normal auction, sniping or no. How exactly does sniping "prevent others from bidding more"? Ebay has this miraculous system in place so that if you put in $500, the bid is at $300, and someone else bids $450 1 second before the auction ends, you'll still win the item (for about $460). Hey, look, the sniper didn't win the auction, and nothing stopped me from putting in my high bid.
If it didn't matter, then why didn't they bid 3 days ago when they first saw the object? Of course, because it does matter, and they know it. If it didn't matter when they bid, the snipers wouldn't snipe. You can't convince me that the timing of the bids and when I get out bid doesn't matter. You know it does, because you know sniping is effective.
This is the stupidest piece of circular logic I've ever heard. Yeah, sniping can win you auctions you wouldn't normally win, but only if you're bidding against someone who doesn't enter their high bid from the start. Those people aren't doing the auction right, so sniping can mess their strategy up. But if you DO put your maximum price in at the beginning, then IT DOESN'T MATTER WHEN YOU GET OUTBID, right? Because you wouldn't have bid any more than you already put in. So if there's something that you WOULD pay $500 for, but you'd rather have it for $450, you don't f***ing put in a bid for $450 and bitch about getting sniped at the last minute. You're doing it wrong.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
Of course, what I neglected to mention is that the 5% fee is typically split between agents (sometimes 3 to 2, sometimes
2.5% to 2.5%). Now you're talking $2500 for 10 "days" worth of work versus $3000 for 60 "days". The opportunity cost
for you to get another FIVE $2500 commissions versus an extra $500 is hardly worth it. Even if you figure you're not
going to get 5 more sales, and only get one in the remaining 50 days, that's still a difference of $2000. Plus,
you build word of mouth for selling properties fast (which can be important to many sellers), and it's not like the
seller is going to find out concretely that they could have had 20% more for waiting 50 days.
Like so many things, it's all about churn. And as with anything, it is important to understand the motivations driving
a person's actions. Just remember when buying or selling anything (especially a house) using any kind of agent, that
the agent is interested in completing *A* sale (not the *BEST* sale), and typically ASAP so they can lather-rinse-repeat.
Cheers,
Slak
I think the biggest utility of sniping is when you want 1 of some item, and there are 300 listed on ebay. You determine what price you're willing to pay, and sniping ensures that you only end up with 1 item. If you just put your maximum bid in for all 300 you might end up with 50 of them. However, if you put your max bid on only 1 item then you might be outbid on that one item, when a another iteration might sell for less due to an inefficient market.
This is really the only point in sniping.
I think that approach has some seriously flawed logic.
1. "Targeting" a single auction out of 300 with the intent of winning it (rather than getting the best deal) increases the likelyhood that you will end up bidding more than the item is truly worth.
2. The approach assumes that you would end up with a better deal sniping the auction than if you bid your honest maximum early in the auction's life.
3. It assumes that there will be other snipers working against you (since other snipers would be the only ones hiding their true maximum bid; non-snipers would have already bid their maximum)
The only way you win auctions is if your maximum bid exceeds the maximum bids of the non-snipers, and/or (if you're a sniper) your "sniping bid" can be made before other snipers have a chance to "snipe" their way above your own maximum bid.
A potential sniper should ask himself how he is able to snipe at all. The top bidders in the last couple of minutes of an auction are all snipers. Since these bids all exceed the maximum bids of the non-snipers, this suggests (tiny incremental bids notwithstanding) that non-snipers are either underbidding, or snipers are all overbidding.
Well, picture this scenario - there are 50 items that I want 1 of on ebay. I'm willing to pay up to $50 for 1 of these items. The various auctions end at intervals, but mostly at inconvenient hours or such that I'd rather not sit in front of the PC watching them.
I could bid my true value on 1 of those items. It looks like I have the winning bid on that item when I go to bed. When I wake up, somebody has outbid me with $60 and I didn't get it. I also note that 1 of the other identical items sold for $30 - I would have gotten that one for less than my max bid.
With sniping I just tell my software what my max bid is, and it bids the first item up to 50 and stops, and then bids the second item up to 50 and stops, and so on - until I get an item for 50 or less.
I would never bid on an item with the only goal of getting it for any price - that's just silly unless it is some kind of collectible with sentimental value.
No. I didn't create any new problems. I just live with lots of the old ones and solved few of them. Sniping is not a silver bullet. It's just a weak remedy against idiots. Like you.
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A question I could not find answered in the hundreds of comments on this topic: "Does Ebay automatated bidding have a "TIME" advantage over sniping?" Let me illustrate my question: Situation: Ultimate goal is to get a product, and let's say the product is a rare find, but I still want to get for the lowest price: So, Let's say I have a sniping service and set up for a maximum bid of $500. And let's say the bidding is going along to the last 30 seconds or so, and a bidder bids at $85. I assume that my last snipe would come in at say $90 in the last few seconds and I would win. But, let's then take this scenario: If during the same auction, someone used Ebay's automatic bid function, and placed their maximum price at $400. In this same case, let's say in the last seconds of the same auction, the bid was $85, and my snipe comes in 5 seconds before the auction ends at $90, would the ebay automatic service automatically win even though my sniper was set at $500? In other words, does EBAY take a time advantage that a sniper could then not react to? Clearly I was willing to pay more, but I assume that with a last bid coming in at $90 by my sniper, can the ebay system "place" a bid even faster than it can be sniped...or for that matter, is an ebay automatic bid that was set up earlier going to win over a snipe after an auction ends? If this IS true, it would seem the best strategy if you really want a product cheap, would be to wait until the last minute, then use EBAY automatic bid and set up a really high price, thereby meaning sniping could be easily defeated. Thanks for the input... Jason
However your Internet connection drops out / you have computer problems
Sniping can be done via some web services, so that it's not dependent upon your PC being online.
/ EBay has emergency maintenance
This happens so rarely, it's inconsequential.
AKA sniping, what a stupid term
This term has been around for quite a long time now. Are you one of the people who still posts "what a stupid name" every time someone mentions the Wii?
The usefulness for this practice [...] approaches zero as it becomes more common.
Then sniping just forces everyone to proxy bid properly. It neutralizes the incremental bidders who are not properly proxy bidding in the first place.
In your attempt to solve one problem, you've created others.
This is like saying that curing cancer will mean that more people will now die of heart disease. While true, the net gain is positive.
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