quote:
justinlake posted: "Ok, I just won my first auction with AS but I'm a bit confused. It appears that AS simply inserted a last minute proxy bid for me with my maximum dollar bid. If that's all that happened, why not just submit my own proxy bid through eBay and eliminate the middle-man?"
justinlake...that's a fair question and, as a new sniper, understandable why you might be confused.
First of all: yes you could just go ahead and place a proxy bid through eBay, however, then you are indicating an interest in the item and thus, "showing your hand" to other potential bidders. They, then, might put in higher proxy bids (or sniper bids) than they might have had they thought there was no other interest...the result being: perhaps outbidding you.
Second: you could go ahead and manually snipe (placing your own last minute bid on eBay) and this is indeed how many of the AuctionSniper users (including me) started. But you risk your bid not getting through on time, if you have a bad connection, and/or the auction might be ending at a time when sleep, work, play, or real life is just getting in the way.
By placing a proxy bid instead of a snipe, you risk starting a bidding war. Where another bidder sees your bid and places a higher one, then you come back to outbid them, then they come back, etc, etc...perhaps raising the ultimate selling price higher than if you would have just thrown in a bid at the last minute (sniping).
The risks with sniping include: your bid might not get in on time (solution is to have a sufficient lead time considering the day and time of the auction), or the seller could potentially end the auction early thinking there is no interest (happens rarely, I think).
Yes, AuctionSniper does charge a fee but it really is pretty low...especially when one considers that you usually make out in the end if it is an item that you really want.
However, I think that most of us believe that the benefits of sniping far outweigh the risks and most of us have won the vast majority of the auctions we've sniped on; usually spending far less than we put in as a max bid.
Ultimately, you have to decide for yourself if sniping is for you. I would suggest that you give it a good try and see if you're not won over by it. Some snipers use AS for all their bidding, some use it only on certain items and using the traditional bidding system and/or manual sniping for other things.
Good luck!
WarriorNun
"If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning"
Actually, after getting sniped out of several auctions, I decided to do a little research to find out what the big deal was. I found a few papers studying sniping, but the paper above was the most lucent.