Better tool needed for Sniping a Dutch Auction

Yes we are aware of how eBay works. Bidding on a single item works fine. Bidding on multiple quantity in a dutch auction leaves a little to be desired.

The scenario you mentioned would work probably most of the time. Sometimes though it would fail either if we couldn't quickly enough get a reply from eBay OR if another bidder sniped. In that case if we didn't bid your max you would lose them all.

It's really a lose/lose situation for us. If we do the higher bid you win but you pay more. If we do the lower bid and people would sometimes lose because we checked at 15 seconds and did a low bid of say $5.36 and they lost because another bidder bid $7.50 with 5 seconds left and now you're ticked because your max was $12.25.

We'd get all sorts of angry support cases saying we only bid $5.36 for them and if we had bid $12.25 they'd have won, etc. Not all the time, but some portion of the time.

Which is better who knows? Maybe your suggestion would be better. It is something we are aware of though.

Thank you

Well, that's close to a cop-out. Please don't kill off the idea simply because "some" users would complain -- you are getting too far ahead of a problem that doesn't even exist.

The idea for such a special purpose snipe attack isn't the thing to squash, just yet. As with any new product, there would be a lot of pre-thinking to try and guess someone's reaction. The people who save money this way certainly will be begging to keep such a program alive, once started. This would keep your competitors in need of playing catch-up to match your unique approach to sniping. It would keep certain users happy. And of course, there's the matter of spelling things out.

I mean, the whole idea of your service is that the sniping routine is held blameless for problems in which the high bid is not met. By merely having a new set of rules for a new sniping routine would probably suffice. A new set of rules, policies, and a catchy (implicity different) Brand Name (TM) will help. For example, you could call it "DUTCH SMART SNOOPING," since the whole system is really an intelligent way of snooping the price, and keeping sniped Dutch prices down.

Warning: Any bids in the last 15 seconds of this auction might prevent your SNOOP BID from winning. Keep this in mind when setting your minimum bid.

Of course, a more complex system like this would probably allow you to charge more per SNOOP than for a regular snipe.

Can you explain what happens in a dutch? I was under the impression that the $12.25 bid would go against everybody else that bid under you. So the person that bid $40 would win, and you would win based on the third high bidder. So if #1 bid $40, you bid $12.25, and the 3rd bid $4.10 (everyone else is lower). You and the person that bid $40, would get the items for the #10 bid (which could be less than $4.10). Is this not correct? Why would you have gotten it for $7 less if you snooped the auction first?