Look guys, clearly eBay is trying to defeat Snipe sites. This is a new reality. They probably developed some sort of rule-based code routine that checks IPs, time to auction end, and other fingerprints that differentiate a human user from a third party program. I believe a major parameter is a user's session length compared to when they place the snipe bid. Meaning that in that split second after the AS program logs in, it places a bid. Also the lead time for the bid may be being detected too. 4-5 seconds before auction end is clearly a marker for a Snipe bot so that also may trigger the verification. Maybe the user's history of bidding at the last minute is a factor.
I suppose eBay wants us all in front of the screen in the last 10 minutes of an auction to maximize the hammer price and consequently their profits. I know that automatic snipers and that whole are really not part of their business model, meaning they want to maximize eyes on the screen, also to drive up ad revenue, no. of clicks, add-on buys, etc. They've got teams of developers and analysts whose only purpose is to defeat Snipe sites and increase human clicks and page views. Most if not all online retailers or other sites that deal with the customer to get their online $ hate third-party automatic programs and bots which take the place of a human interaction with their site. The only good bot is *their* bot, as to what is allowed. eBay makes their money from humans who spend time on their site. Maximizing the time a customer is on eBay is not what a third party agent does so that's why now, as Snipe sites get a bigger share of the winning bids, they've declared war on us. And your bottom dollar that eBay has made sure that verification is never triggered when a human user bids, even at the last minute. So the assertion from AS that eBay does this from time to time is a lame excuse. I'd like to be treated a little more intelligently by AS Support, thank you.
So here's the deal. Auction Sniper knows very well this is an anti-snipe weapon. The fact is that it could be a business killer for them and it has been happening for some time tells me that they're either clueless or powerless to do something about it. By now they would have reasonably developed a counter fix to the verification check. I'm getting really fed up with the AS support, being unfriendly, clueless, and ineffective. This may well be their final straw.
Here's what I'm going to do in the short term.
For auctions of items that I definitely want to win no matter what, I will bid manually.
I have increased the lead time on one of my upcoming snipes up to 8 or 10 seconds, just to test if that makes a difference.
I am also going to log in and stay logged in to eBay within 15 minutes (min avg cookie session time) of auction end.
I am also going to start sniping with another AS account just to see if eBay is going after the hard core habitual offenders.
In the long term or sooner, if eBay continues this BS and AS doesn't find a fix, if the above ideas don't work, I'll drop AS like a ton of bricks and walk.
I'll let you know.
In any case the best solution hands down is a downloaded snipe program that we can install on our own PCs which snipes for us from the IP with which we logged in and stay logged through auction end. Letting a third party do this for us always was never a guarantee of getting the winning bid, thus with a high degree of risk because we're delegating to a third party agent. Now it seems that those chickens have come to roost.
This reminds me of those heady days of the Wild West Web of the mid to late 90s when search engines were constantly fighting web coders that modified web site pages to get higher search result placement. Most of you weren't even born yet (joke). It became so bad that search sites were even blocking the worst offending web sites and even server IPs from displayed results. There were young men and women "hired guns" ("search engine gurus") who represented that they had cracked the search engine's code and could achieve amazing results for web site business owners. Major money was spent, many late night hours burned. Some of the more astute guys even got sued by the search sites. No, really.
Anyway.., AS needs to fess up and come clean to their customers about what they know and don't know. Everything. I surmise that might not be very much and that's why they're playing the same old unprofessional, lame broken record to us: "It's eBay's fault".
This situation could very well completely change the AS business model to one that may fail the company unless they develop a solution quickly. Folks are not going to keep losing items with AS. Very soon we'll walk.
Thoughts?
-FU