Hello region2... I appreciate your response. Had I known how Auction Sniper was going to work, I certainly wouldn't have chosen to use it for that auction. I was sitting right here, thinking that it would do the job for me since I'm on a dial-up and can't time my bidding as precisely as those using faster connections. But sending in a bid two minutes earlier than I requested is more than compensating for Sunday night traffic.... it's a real goof. I could have put my bid in manually much closer to the auction end, preventing the second-high bidder from putting in four bids against me. The first bid would have only ratcheted up my final price a fraction of what it did.
As for getting something for next-to-nothing... that isn't the point. An item is worth exactly what someone is willing to pay for it. The doll is worth what I paid for it, but the whole idea of sniping is to get the item for less than might be possible otherwise by bidding so close to the end as to close out other bids. Otherwise, why snipe at all? Just place a bid at the beginning of the auction and hope for the best. Besides, placing a bid at the end of the auction is not without risk; the bidder doesn't have a chance to bid again if the initial bid was not high enough to get over the proxy of the present high bidder.
Bottom line is that I will not use Auction Sniper again unless I am away from home and can't get to another computer to place my bid. Even on my dial-up I outperform Auction Sniper! Not knowing that my wishes would be ignored, I expected AS to do what it promised to do... place my bid 5 seconds before the end of the auction. If the lead time was going to be 2 minutes, the program should have indicated that on my snipe page. Then I could have cancelled the snipe and bid myself... saving myself a nice chuck of cash.