I thought I'd try Auction Sniper since in three months of bidding for items on ebay I was sniped almost every time. I am happy to report that it worked perfectly the first time. I would definitely have lost the item without AS and the next highest bid was $1.00 less then my winning bid and $2.78(!) less than my maximum (good guess, huh? I don't have any idea why i thought $69.78 was the exact amount it was worth.)
In case anyone's taking a poll, the auction ended on Aug-24-03 18:13:45 PDT (Sunday PM.) I set my bid to come in 12 seconds before close and and it was registered at 18:13:30. Way to go AS!
It seems like the stuff I bid on (vintage guitars and amplifiers) may have a high rate of snipers, because when my girlfriend bids on stuff, I never see any sniping. I guess there's a lot of reselling going on in some categories, because I see lots of bidders with numbers in the high thousands next to their names. I would bet resellers use automated bidding a lot. If you're just bidding against end users, maybe there are fewer snipers.
quote:Originally posted by cooper: If you're just bidding against end users, maybe there are fewer snipers.
I think price and if the item is a collectable has an influence on the amount of sniping. The more competitive, the more sniping. Snipers are out to win.
I think Rick's right on the money (no surprise there). I'm an end user...once an item goes into my collection it stays there. But boy! do I face a lot of competing snipers since I have all the "easy" stuff already and only bid on the scarcest and most desirable items. I'm not sure if price has an impact on all snipers -- some of them want to economize to the extent possible, but money is not a primary consideration, so they snipe with very high maximum bids. These are the ones with deep pockets that I seem to run into.
