All EBAY/PayPal related posts here please

[wheelaa]

@ gruce

Absolutely dont agree with that 100%.

All it does is pushes the price up,which joe public then perceives as a 'rare' item,hence you get common items going for stupid money on ebay.

Totally ****s me off tbh.

www.auctionsniper.com

Set the delay to 2 seconds,and provided your bid is high enough you'll win every time.

Sure but then for some items it works the other way. In the past I have seen items I want, think a last minute bid will do..then the seller ends the item early to sell privately as the item has received no bids, but an offer or two in private.

(I actually benefited once from this..auction for Pal T-Mek..no bids so he sold it privately to me)

[AllYourBase]

i prefer auctionsentry as once you have the software it pays for itself (try a 30 day trial), those websites charge 1% of the auction end price, not good in the long term - i can't believe free sniping sites aren't harvesting details for evil either!!!

[Mayhem]

Sure but then for some items it works the other way. In the past I have seen items I want, think a last minute bid will do..then the seller ends the item early to sell privately as the item has received no bids, but an offer or two in private.

Had that done a couple of times to me as well... if it's an item I really want, I'll put a bid in (for the min price) just to confirm it and then go for the snipe at the end. Sellers are usually, I've found, not willing to end an auction early if it has bids on it. Of course some still will do, but it's just a way to show interest and not have them end it early!

@AllYourBase - it does mean having your PC on when the auction ends and being connected to the net. You could have a power failure, net disconnect or anything else affect your bid. Which is why I do like the website version instead.

[AllYourBase]

It is a small worry for me to have the pc on as i will usually set it to run from my works machine which stays on over the weekend - i have had a 100% success rate, but if the network went down i guess it'd be teh lose! perhaps not best to use it for the auction of a lifetime (but what would that be?!)

[SubparMario]

I just do it manually. Most auctions end at reasonable times and it's not hard to time your bid for the last 5 seconds.

[Alastair]

But that's what happened to me - I was winning with NO seconds left and 20 quid to the limit of my proxy but one of these sites or pieces of software outbid me on the final second of the auction.

These days doing it yourself doesn't seem to be enough. I've now signed up to the site Nick recommended.

[SubparMario]

my take on bidding

But they beat your maximum bid so you were always going to lose. If you were prepared to pay more then your one and only bid (the pre-determined maximum you're prepared to pay come crunch time, not a reaction bid to someone else 'stealing' your auction) should have been higher. There's no reason to place more than one bid over the course of an auction. Sniping only works against the foolish bidders who like to do multi-staged bids in reaction to other people (like a real auction) and then don't have enough time to put in another. If you're up against someone else who knows what they're doing and is prepared to pay more then there's no way to get one over on them.

[Dirty Sanchez]

My strategy for sniping is to bid with 10 to 15 seconds left with my maximum bid minus a nominal amount then IMMEDIATELY put in my real higer bid. The watcher will usually only see the 1st high bid then when they enter their high bid they are outbid with no time to put in a higher bid.

No item is that rare that I would get involved in a bidding war, I put my first bid in to get the item in my list for easy access then put my final bid in the dying seconds.

[Mad Gear]

What would happen if you had a few people using sniping software on the same auction?

[Street Turk]

MAD Syndrome

Mutually Assured Destruction

[SubparMario]

Radiant Silvergun would get shot to pieces ft:

[nightstalker100]

What would happen if you had a few people using sniping software on the same auction?

It depends on the muzzle velocity of the sniping software

[smallvillex]

and that means....?

[Gruce]

I suppose whoever is willing to pay the most will win. Thats all it ever comes down to, if you snipe and someone has a proxy that is more that you then they win, and the other way round. You don't need fancy tricks to win, you need money.

[smallvillex]

So very true