ok i have a few questions

1) It's legal, and doesn't break ebay's policies (excluding ebay Germany).

2) It works. People are quick to complain, and slow to complement. Most of the negatives are from people that sign up for this forum just to leave a complaint. They may leave one or two posts, and then they're gone. Using 8 to 10 second lead times, would prevent a lot of these problems. Sometimes ebay is having a melt down. Nothing AS can do about it. Rarely, AS has a problem (nothing's perfect). You'll notice that there tends to be clusters of complaints. If AS can't get the snipes placed, all kinds of people go ape, and leave their complaints. But also notice, that most of the times when there are no complaints. That's when everything is happening the way it should. Sara once posted that AS makes 10,000 snipes a day. If that's true, you'd see a lot more complaints if AS wasn't working.

3) Who ever bids the most gets it. If the proxy bidder is higher, they get it. If the sniper bid is higher, they get it. In case of a tie the proxy bidder will get it (1st bidder gets it). In case you don't leave enough of a snipe to reach the next increment, the proxy bidder will get it. If ebay has a melt down, the proxy bidder will get it.

I've left another post that provides some more pointers, if you're interested.

ok i think i didn't make my third question clear enough....heres what i meant; say there was a proxy bider with a max bid of 20 dollars but his current bid was 10 dollars. now lets say that i sniped the auction with a bid of 15 dollars. would the proxy biders still automatically raise and win? or would there not be enough time and i the sniper win?

hey hey hey?

The proxy bidder would win, and the item would cost them $15.50. Having AS place a snipe for you is no different than you making a bid. What ever ebay would do with your bid, ebay will do that same thing with a snipe.

As to having time ... If you mean you want to place a manual bid if your snipe is not high enough, you would have to have your snipe placed with enough lead time to allow you to place a manual bid. Hard to do. And that isn't how snipers work. They decide the MAXIMUM they are willing to pay, set their snipe at that amount, and wake up in the morning to a cup of coffee and check out what happened.

You have 3 free snipes coming to you. Find something very cheap, but not important to you. Place a snipe. See how it goes. If you don't get it, no big deal.

I sometimes do it the other way around -- place a manual bid with maybe a minute to go and then have an AS snipe two bid increments higher set up to go in with 8 seconds left. I do this only when it appears that eBay is running extremely slow and then only when it's one of those "gotta have it" items. Usually works very well for me, and only once in a great while has the snipe bid actually been necessary. Having AS as a backup is a source of great comfort to me.