I seem to have won an auction by "surprise surprise" one pence and its got me thinking. As AuctionSniper make their money by taking 1% of the final price then the higher the final price then the more they make.

I wondered how many people here have won an item by just outbidding the next highest bidder by a few seconds and also ended up paying their maximum amount.

If you look at my first example here:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&it...=STRK:MEWN:IT&ih=003

The auction finished at "18:46:38" and you'll see that there was a bid by "Bidder 4" at exactly one minute 18:45:38 before the end at £200 and my maximum amount was £200.01 (hmm!).

I have contacted the seller to see if they can provide me with more details of who "bidder 4" is.

I dont think i'll be using AuctionSniper until I get to the bottom of it.

WARNING! WARNING! You can’t trust the seller – they might be in on it. After all, the seller made a lot more money off the auction then AS did.

D'oh!
AS did exactly what you paid it to do, it placed your snipe (at the max amount you specified) in the last few seconds and you won. As to the mechanism of the win that's down to ebay's Proxy Bidding system and no slight of hand bu anyone.
Although it bores me to have to spell it out, here goes:
At 18:45:38 Bidder 4 placed a bid of £200 which easily beat Bidder 3's bid of £177. However, at that point, the high bid would have appeared to be £182 (ie. one full increment over Bidder 3's bid) in favour of Bidder 4.
Then AS did its thing with your maximum bid of £200.01 (well done for adding the extra penny - if you'd bid just £200 you would have lost!) and ebay's proxy bidding swang into action giving you the 1 penny win.
No conspiracy, no fraud, no secret handshakes took place.
As to the identity of Bidder 4 - read what it says on the Bid History page:

quote:

To help keep the eBay community safe, enhance bidder privacy, and protect our members from fraudulent emails, only you and the seller of the item can view your User ID in bid history. Other members will see anonymous names.

So, Mark, stop being paranoid (drugs can have that affect!) and enjoy the moment.

R2 (who told you I was paranoid?!)

quote:

Originally posted by Rick:
WARNING! WARNING! You can’t trust the seller – they might be in on it. After all, the seller made a lot more money off the auction then AS did.

Why ?

I’d thought you might enjoy expanding the conspiracy. At this point I’d also take a long/hard look at R2 - I’ve ALWAYS been suspicious of him. (If you’re not laughing at this point, or just a grin, then all is lost)

Based on R2’s figures, Bidder 4 only increased the price by £18.01 (200.01 less 182.00). Do you REALLY think AS would be playing games (aka shilling) so as to increase their profit by 18p? Either you’re the only user and all this (service, forum, et al) is to get that 18p, OR not.

I know – 18p times 1 million snipes/users starts to add up. Only problem with that – even a random selection of a million Yanks would net AT LEAST a few people (one, maybe two) that would spot the fraud (work with me on this - I’m being optimistic with my compatriots).

Grant it – Bidder 4 doesn’t have much bidding experience on ebay. That’s probably why they bid (aka bidded/bade/bidden) an even £200.

You won by 1p – it usually doesn’t get any sweeter for a sniper (other then a tie, but that requires that the snipe gets placed before another sniper’s snipe).

Ouch! Rick gets a 'Why ?' but I don't even get a 'thank you Region2 for explaining why I won and shouldn't start thinking that the world is out to get me'....

R2

Mark, to put it on the bottom line, you won because you outbid the other bidder. When someone whines about losing to a "sniper", what they are really saying is they did not bid enough.