AS enters bid at 11 secs when set to snipe @ 3 secs

I have been watching another copy. Already have sniper set. I was just surprised that this happened. First time in twenty snipes.

Steve - at issue is the ability of AS to deliver accurate snipes that are accepted by Ebay at the snipe time indicated by the person paying AS to so do. Many ebay bidders who manually snipe do not understand the system and do not bid their maximum, but instead react to bids by placing higher bids. When the AS system does not accurately gauge the ebay lag time and sends bids to ebay too early, ebay recieves my bid too early, and others have time to view and respond to my bid with a higher bid. A bid that they would have never made had the AS system correctly calculated the time at which my bid would need to be sent to ebay so as to result in a last second bid acceptance. So this is not a matter of bidding the most you are willing to pay.

Kildes,

I had exactly the same problem, my snipe was sent 9 seconds before the end, instead of 4 seconds (see http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3033505777&category=11713&rd=1 ). After reading this post, I may have another explanation : you and I might have been "outsniped", this means that the winner also used AS, but with a higher amount. In the FAQ (http://www.auctionsniper.com/faq.aspx#63), AS claims that if 2 people snipe for the same object, they send both snipes at the same time. My guess is that if ebay is slow, AS sends the snipe that has the higher amount on time and the others (who will be outbidded anyway) a few seconds in advance. Could someone from AS confirm that ? if yes, AS should state it clearly in the FAQ.

Even if our bids had been put on time (4 seconds), they would have been "outsniped" by the other, so there's no regret to have.

One more thing : there is litle chance that the winner could have seen our snipe and send a higher manuel bid, because the maximum amount is never sniped until someone make a higher bid. Lets take my snipe : at 17:10:05 sagebrushi put a bid for $76 at 18:02:11, my snipe is sent and the auctions probably goes up to 77$ (not shown there). Then jr120 make a bid at 79$, thinking he is the highest (he doesn't know that my snipe goes up to $150). Finally the snipe of mas2564 is sent, with a higher amount than mine and he wins.

In your case, I think that when your snipe was sent, the auctions went up to $31.04 (one dollar more that the previous bidder). If aeromoonpye had beed a "manual" bidder, he would have bid $32.04 or something like that (like jr120 for me) and would have been immediately outbidded by you. This was not the case because aeromoonpye sent a snipe with an amount higher that $75 and won the bid.

AS can help you win an auction where people, like jrv120 in my case, manually increase their bids a few dollars each time. But if 2 people use AS for the same object, the higher amount always wins.

[This message was edited by callmejack on July 09, 2003 at 12:03 AM.]

In the case of the "100-second snipe" I agreed that it appeared to be an anomaly. However, you don't seem to be aware that AS varies the preset time for a snipe when its monitoring of eBay bid reaction time indicates that the preset time is likely to be insufficient for eBay to register the snipe bid before auction close. This has been the source of much commentary, a lot of it adverse, over the pros and cons of adjusting a snipe in hopes that it will be accepted in time by eBay versus just submitting the snipe as preset and letting the chips fall where they may. It's a no-win situation for AS, which doesn't make any money if a snipe isn't submitted in time. If AS sends in the snipe with, say, 4 seconds left and it's a busy time at eBay, the sniper is likely to turn up in this Forum breathing fire and demanding to know why his snipe didn't go through. On the other hand, if AS adjusts the timing of the snipe and is successful in getting it through to eBay before auction close, the same sniper is likely to turn up in this Forum breathing fire and demanding to know why his timing was ignored or adjusted.

On balance, I think AS's course of adjusting the timing of a snipe -- within reason, not by a hundred seconds -- is preferable. In any case, it is not correct to say, as callmejack does, that "My guess is that if ebay is slow, AS sends the snipe that has the higher amount on time and the others (who will be outbidded anyway) a few seconds in advance. Could someone from AS confirm that?" I am not "from AS," I'm just a sniper like you folks, but I know that AS is all about submitting snipes, to the exclusion of considerations like "one snipe is higher than the other so that one goes in first." AS does not weigh one snipe against another, or compare to see whether more than one AS subscriber is bidding on the same item. They don't make the servers that could handle that kind of load.

The suggestion has been made that AS could offer its subscriber-snipers the option of indicating whether they want their preset time altered or not. I don't know whether AS could do that, or if they're planning to make that option available at some future time if they can.