I've done a lot of thinking about this since I have done a lot of selling and buying on Ebay recently. The main benefit to me of using Auction Sniper is that I can change my mind about a bid I'm going to place up until right before the auction ends. Suppose a less expensive, better or more desireable version of what I'm bidding on comes up, maybe with a Buy It Now option. If I've got the winning bid on something else, I've got to wait until I'm outbid before I can do something about the new item. In that amount of time maybe someone else will meet the reserve and cancel the BIN option. Either way, with Auction Sniper I've got all the options but if I had placed a bid on the item when I first saw it I'd have almost no leeway to do anything.
I had a large expensive item to sell (an older piece of furniture worth $750-$1000. I waited until another one was listed and then I listed mine (better condition/lower reserve). i got a lot of bids and a good price. The previously listed item is now on it's fourth listing. After I listed mine, ANOTHER one showed up, even less expensive. I told my high bidder at the time that I would cancel his bid for him if he wanted me to, so that he could bid on the less expensive one (years of retail selling taught me that you want to try to kill the deal so you know if it's going to have any problems before it even leaves your store...you don't want a buyer to think he could have gotten a better deal across town...just causes probs down the road.) This high bidder ended up buying from me and he said part of the reason was that I offered to let him out of his bid. He's got the item now and I got a + feedback from him. The point of this is that I feel like he doesn't quite understand how Ebay works, because if he did he wouldn't have placed that bid so early. Maybe people think that by holding a winning bid early in the auction they have some kind of claim on the item. I personally let Auction Sniper do all my bidding, 10 seconds before the end. I've never had a seller get mad at me for bidding this way...in fact I have gotten good feedback (when they actually give you feedback...ARRRRGH!) from all the sellers I have bought from because I use Paypal to pay within minutes. So if a bidder were to take me to task for winning an item they had bid on I would just tell them that they had ample opportunity to place a higher bid...so why didn't they?
coop