A lot of members bid at the last minute. I am one of them. Some members use a sniping program to do it for them.

I never bid on anything because that shows I am interested in the item and people will bid me up. I always bid at the last second and put my highest bid. If I don't get it my philosophy is there will always be another one next time.

Cathy

It is not necessarily a sniping program when bids are placed in the lst few seconds.

I do not use a program and regularly place bids in the last 3-5 seconds.

Ebay is not like an auction on TV where they say "going, going, gone!", and the auctioneer waits until everyone has finished bidding.

 

Instead, eBay works more like a tender process, with a fixed ending time. Everyone has equal opportunity to make an offer, and nobody really knows what each other has bid. Whoever offers the highest, wins.

 

So, irrespective of when the bids get placed, the highest bid wins. Therefore strategically it is usually much better NOT to place a bid early, because it gives other people the opportunity to counter-bid. Much sneakier to hold off until the dying moments.

 

These "snipe" bids (snipe as in sniper, who shoots you out of nowhere) are the most common bidding strategy with experienced buyers. There is no second chance, the snipe must be extremely decisive... the techinique is to decide on a maximum price and offer it. If you win, great... if you miss out then the other person paid too much.

 

A saying that I heard years ago sums it up perfectly...

 

The nibble bidder bids for a bargain and hopes for a win - yet the sniper bids to win, and hopes for a bargain.

The One Click bid thing appears if you've previously bid at any time - so it could have been a week earlier. I've been a member for over 10 years and I've never used that button, so that's all I know.

 

With the sniping - you don't need to leave it until the very last second... it doesn't really matter. Always remember - the HIGHEST bid wins, not the latest.

 

In fact, due to the way that eBay works, an early bid gives some advantages. This is because subsequent bids must be at least 1 Bid Increment higher in order to be accepted. And if 2 bids are identical, then the earlier bid wins.

 

In practical terms, that means that any bid placed in the last 10 to 15 seconds will be good enough to win a snipe. Even 10 seconds doesn't really leave the opposition enough time to notice the price increase, type in a new offer and click to bid.

 

And even if you are the highest at 15 seconds, eBay doesn't expose your actual bid - the opposition only know that you are 1 bid increment higher than the 2nd placed bidder. Thus they still have to guess your maximum and offer higher than it.

 

In summary - it's not really the "last moment snipe" that makes it successful - but rather that you are bidding decisively with your maximum price. The snipe is the "swecondary defence" - done simply so that your maxium offer is not out there for 7 days so that other people can repeatedly bid and bid and bid against it and push the price up (or even beat you).

Whilst you're right about eBay beiong more like a tender process, I disagree about the auction scenario.  At an auction the auctioneer  "does wait until everyone has finished bidding" but there is nothing to stop you from bidding as he says his last "gone".  He then asks again for more bids and does the going, going, gone again.  I have done this and seen it done, usually everyone is so astonished by the bid at the very, very last minute that they can't get themselves together to bid again.  This is particularly effective if that very, very last bid is quite a bit higher than the last one.

putney .... I wasn't in any way talking about re-opening the bidding ....  I said as "he says the final gone", clearly I should have also said "before the hammer has fallen/hit the desk/whatever".

 

 

I'd like to say that in the last 8 seconds of bidding I beat one of the snipes and won the item I genuinely wanted. Though this person was in my opinion trying to up the price and the increments got much larger and larger till the final price which worth more than the item was worth. I felt in this instance it was done deliberately. How do you find out if that was the case or if it was done by the seller?

I like using a snipe because that means I won't have to stay up until some ungodly hour waiting to place a bid on an overseas purchase.

 

I've also placed bids earlier on an item occasionally because I've wanted to know how many people are watching that item.  You can't view watchers on items with no bids (well not using the program I like).