Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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
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 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
There are a ton of sniping services out there. eSnipe is just one of the more popular ones (don't ask me why).
e cts&Go.x=0&Go.y=0
There's even at least one completely free and no-registration-required sniping service: http://www.cniper.com/
But why give a third party your ebay account information and let them track your bidding habits, when you can run a sniping tool on your own machine?
Here're some sniping tools that'll run on Linux, courtesy of freshmeat:
http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=snipe§ion=proj
And here's esniper, a tool that I personally prefer:
http://esniper.sourceforge.net/
It's very no frills and is text-only, but is absolutely reliable, easy to use, and functional enough to get the job done. I set aside a screen session for it, let it run in the background, and go do something else while it snipes for me.
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).
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
Not so. Snipers are perfectly logical. YOU might set your max-price-you're-willing-to-pay but there are hordes of ebayers out there who bid incrementally. Snipers just bid the max-price-they're-willing-to-pay for the item, just like you, but they do it as late as possible so as not to give the nonlogical incremental bidders the chance to outbid them. This means they've got more chance of getting the item and they're likely to get the item for less.
It's got nothing to do with 'beating the other guy' or 'resorting to sniping' or 'winning is the only goal' or any nonsense like that. It's just the optimal strategy for maximising the chance of winning and minimising the price paid for the item.
What I love are the assholes who troll fresh auctions with "Buy It Now" prices and no reserve to remove the "BIN" option from others auctions. They bid $1 simply to remove the "Buy It Now" price just to be a pain. You can track them doing it across hundreds of auctions a day. As a seller I find this unacceptable, particularly when I'm paying to use the BiN function. My BIN price should remain until bidding reaches 25% of the BIN price or $25, whichever is lower.
I stopped using Ebay as a resource to purchase or sell anything because of sniping, BIN wasting trolls and rampant fraud. In my mind the only feature they could add that might bring me back is automatic auction extension when a bid is placed.
I'm sorry but you are a moron. A big F@### moron. You want to make money? You don't like sniping? You hate low bids?
THEN RAISE THE FUCKING MINIMUM BID YOU IDIOT!
I have no sympathy for a moron like you who can't recognize that simple fact.
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.
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)
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.
You're stating that sniping is worse for you than using eBay's proxy bidding (when you place your max bid up front and let eBay dispense the increases as necessary)? I can't think of a single possible scenario (assuming no outages, early endings, etc..) where placing a bid earlier (and thusly, announcing your intentions to all possible competitors) is better than placing a bid as late in the game as possible.
And that's not even considering the fact that the majority of snipers use automated sniping sites (www.esnipe.com and www.auctionsniper.com for example), that allow you to set up your bid ahead of time, JUST LIKE EBAY, except you're not locked into it. You can go back and review it, edit it or cancel it up to 5 minutes before the end of the auction. You can't do that with eBay proxy bidding. Once you've placed your eBay proxy bid, you're locked in (except for retracting your bid which is a no-no).
Better yet, the two aforementioned sniping sites allow you to group a collection of bids together in 'bid groups' so that you can try sniping multiple similar auctions and once one of them wins, the other bids will automatically be cancelled.
Here's an excellent resource for sniping information which will be of benefit to anyone looking for logical arguments and reasons for sniping and not illogical, flawed reasons not to.
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.
I yearn for you tragically. A. T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.
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 ...)
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.
I know of someone who sells a lot on eBay, really it is a part time bussines. She pics up items at garage sales and trift shops to resell on eBay. But you know what? She makes the photos and writeups look "just bad enough" that it does not appear to be a bussines sale. Even adds comments like "this does not fit me" It is not misrepresentation if it is true. I suspect many sellers have figured this out.
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.
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!)
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.'"
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