AS recommends we do a Lead Time of five seconds when we go to fill out a snipe. This means that AS will list my max bid about five seconds before auction end.
This, of course, gives plenty of time (look at the second hand on your clock and watch it tick away five long ticks) for the other bidders participating in the auction to re-submit bids that are higher than my Max Bid I placed through Auction Sniper. So as AS just initiated my Max Bid five seconds before auction close, all the other auction participants who are bidding against me are busy typing & re-submitting their higher bids to Ebay. "Ah ha!", they say, "We got some guy who just bid on this item a whole five seconds before auction end. He's just gotta be an Auction Sniper; there's no other explanation for the five-second delay. Any idiot can do a One-Click Bid through Ebay in under a second, yet it took this guy five seconds! So tell you what. Let's do a One-Click Bid on this guy and pull the rug out from under him. After all, we have a whole five seconds to type in three digits into a keyboard then click the mouse pointer on an Icon."
...And again, thanks to Auction Sniper's agonizingly slow Lead Time, I lose the auction with less than a second to go. And most importantly, if I had used the One-Click bid right before auction close, I wouldn't have given the other guys time to increase their bids, and would have walked away with an Ebay item for dirt-cheap!
"But glenns, you're being unfair! You didn't lose the auction because the other participants were exploiting AS's 5-second Lead Time; you lost it because the proxy bid was too high from the very start! (isn't it like the AS fanboys to blame the auction loss on a high proxy bid rather than the real culprit: AS's agonizingly long Lead Time?)
"Remember," the fanboys will drone on, "It's not the last bid that wins the auction, it's the highest ! It can't be AS's long five second Lead Time being exploited by the One-Click bidders that causes the Auction Sniper to lose the auction; no sir. It's the high proxy bid that diddit..."
Notwithstanding mastery of the obvious: All we need do is investigate the time stamps of all auction participants and their respective bids after the auction and see that it wasn't the highest bid that won the auction, but rather it was the speed at which the highest bid was entered into Ebay that won the auction.
And since I can manually enter in a bid using Ebay's One-Click bid in about 1.2 seconds on a slow day, my fingers would beat Auction Sniper's five seconds by about five standard deviations.
How to beat the snipers without paying one red cent for services: Enter your max bid using Ebay's One-Click feature about 500 ms to 1 second before close of auction and you beat the sniper and won the item. By about four seconds.
Does any Auction Sniper tech see things from a different technical perspective?
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