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And ooh, I hate electronic sniping (bids placed at the last millisecond by paid websites).


I have to admit, I don't really understand the problem people have with 'sniping', e- or otherwise. Surely, if the auction ends at time X, any bids placed up to X are as valid as any other? It doesn't matter whether they were placed 5 days or 5 milliseconds before the end of the auction, they are all legal and the highest one wins. What difference does it make if the winning bid was placed by a proxy twice removed (once removed being the ebay system itself, of course), unless you're sitting there trying to outbid the current winner by the smallest possible increment, manually? Use the system, that's what it's there for

The only strategy that makes sense to me is simply to bid whatever you feel the item in question is worth to you, then go away and do something else until the auction ends. You can of course use minor psychological tricks like bidding odd numbers of pounds (or dollars, yen, whatever), not multiples of 2, 5, or 10, and add odd fractions. For example, $197.23, rather than $195. It works surprisingly often.

Bear in mind that even if the winner has used esnipe or something along those lines, they have still at some point decided the maximum price they're happy with and punched it in. In fact, they probably do exactly what I'm advocating, except they're using yet another machine to do it and paying two sets of commission!

The real problem I see with ebay nowadays is simply the overwhelming number of people who are happy to pay over the odds for something, assuming that because it's on ebay it must be a bargain. I've lost count of the number of things I've seen sell for more than I know for a fact they cost in the shops or online, just because the buyer couldn't be bothered to research their purchase properly. Good for sellers, bad for (sensible, ie cheap) buyers

pca
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