AS doesn't do anything you don't tell it. If you put a bid amount in the AS snipe, THAT is the amount that AS submits. I think you are confusing what AS does with what ebay does. AS acts like a secretary or power of attorney for in submitting your bid to ebay. It follows your instructions explicitly, and makes no presumptions as to submit a lower bid than you tell it to!
NOW what EBAY does with your bid is compare it to the max bids other bidders have submitted. (This is true whether you bid manually 2 days before the auction ends OR if you bid with AS in the last few seconds -- the ways ebay handles/processes the bid is identical). The bidder that has THE HIGHEST maximum bid is the one the holds the winning bid. The MAX bid does not necessarily equal the winning bid -- the winning bid can be lower. Ebay only increases the winning bid to the smallest permitted increment above the 2nd highest max bid -- NOT increase it all the way up to your MAX bid. For instance, Paul from the story only needed to pay $87.55 for the gizmo, NOT the $100 he bidded, because that was the maximum amount ebay needed to increase the bid (by proxy) to beat the bids of all the OTHER bidders.
In my novel, I INTENTIONLY gave an example where the FIRST bidder and NOT either of the SNIPERS win the auction. All auctions are won by the bidder THAT BIDS THE MOST, NOT the one that BIDS THE LAST!
Don't get confused and think the amount of any bid you place on ebay (either manually or with AS) HAS to be only 1 bid increment higher than the current winning bid. Paul, from the story, figured he was willing to pay up to 100 (?!) times the bid increment at the time he originally placed his bid. He didn't worry about bid increments -- he let ebay figure all that out for him.
That is ONE of the keys with sniping. You figure out just EXACTLY how much you are willing to pay for an item, and put that in for your bid. If you're sniping, you only have one shot at bidding, so make sure that you put in your TRUE max. That way, if you lose like Andy did, you won't care that some other bidder was willing to pay TOO MUCH for the gizmo!
Don't know if this is clear enough. Maybe someone else can take a run at it if it's not.
Snipe on!
Jabbergah
