Reply to "Losing Snipes"

It's my theory (and I think it's a good one!) that if your bid is placed anytime in the last 30 seconds of an eBay auction then no-one can outbid you as a direct response to your bid.

Thus any bid that happens in the last 30 seconds is almost certainly an electronic bid/snipe of some sort and was going to happen anyway.

So don't get all nervous and waste your time trying to get as close to the wire as possible. Instead, try this:

• Do your homework by looking at the history of similar items
  
• Place your max bid (that's the max you want to spend on the item) as an odd amount (123.45 rather than 123.00) with AS
  
• set the lead time to 8 seconds (increase a bit for Sunday Evening's (USA time) when it's a bit slow)
  
• walk away

If you win - you win. If you lose the it was because someone wanted to spend more than you. And remember, on eBay nothing is rare - it just doesn't come up as often as common items!

R2