Your example:
fivetide bids £20 on day 1 but has a £30 max bid.
OllyK bids £30 in the last 2 minutes
I win, i pay £30 no more or less than i wanted to. Olly goes home empty handed.


In this scenario, Olly's max bid is £30, so he's happy because he didn't want to pay more than £30.

You have paid your maximum, so you haven't got it any cheaper than you wanted. So bidding early hasn't helped you. Granted you have won the item, but my point is, with your method you cannot get possibly get the item any cheaper than if you bid at the last minute.

 

Shhh, if the penny drops we'll have another sniper

 

I just hope I'm not bidding against Olly for anything!

 

You're alright at the moment, I use Auction Sentry which runs locally on my machine and for some reason EBay is always asking me to enter a security number shown as an image which is knackeirng it's ability to logon! Guess I'll fix it when I want something!

 

I still think it's better to do it manually, just seeing how late you can leave that bid gets really exciting!

 

Cool, but I can't be bothered to sit up till 3am to win an auction!

I do like bid groups I have to say, was after a new phone for the house, saw a quad digital set being offered freqently, added as many as I could find to my bid group, set the max bid and left it to it. Took about 15 auctions, but it won one for me in the end, and all for about 10 minutes set up

 

Yes and no. Basically the late bid method only gets you the item cheaply against people who don't just put in their max bid, basically daft people.

However, it is like Schroedingers cat. you don't know if they thought it wasn't worth more than £20 so they are happy to lose out or if they would have bid more if they'd seen it.

Essentially there is no proof that late bidding works because you can never see the other bidder's maximum bid.

And the excitement of bidding in the last minute is what makes people go over their limits!

5t.

 

Well actually you can, put in a silly bid, find out what the max bid was then retract your bid on the grounds of a typing error, job done.

 

That's the point, if people didn't get carried away then early biding would be fine, but they do. By bidding in the last 30 seconds they don't get that chance as they don't realise they've been outbid until it's too late. So actually I'm doing them a favour by preventing them bidding more than they planned

 

And the excitement of bidding in the last minute is what makes people go over their limits!

5t.


This maybe where you're missing the point, what I do is put the maximum I want to pay, as late as possible, usually about 5 seconds from the end, so I can't possibly bid any more.

 

Suspect that won't go down well with ebay or the seller....

And my point is that your max bid is still your max bid so it really doesn't make any difference when you do it. You miss out on a bit of adrenaline but apart from that... nothing

Which is why it doesn't make a difference to people who use it properly like me. I don't care if you outbid me at the last second or immediately, i'm out having a beer with mates or slipping one to the mrs not hunched over the computer because i got my max bid in nice and early and i'm also not going to bid anymore than that.

Essentially the group bidders do exactly the same, if they don't win they just find another to go for.

It really does make no difference so each to their own.

5t.

 

Well as long as you're not looking for a bargain, you may as well carry on doing it the same way.

All we're trying to point out is that you are often paying over the odds.

You've still not come up with an example of getting something cheaper by bidding early, so I guess you agree with us but are going to carry on anyway.

 

To quote eBay's allowable reasons for retracting a bid:
If I was that way inclined, I'd do it from a secondary account as it is shown on your profile how many times you retract.

Yes, my max is still my max, but it frequently is the case that the intially bid amount by someone else is NOT thier max, either due to getting caught up in the moment or because they don't understand eBay.

I'm not hunched over anything, I use an automated tool to bid for me.

In general you will pay less / win more auctions if you snipe due to people's tendancy to up their bid once they have been outbid.

 

I get the impression fivetide see it as "I'm prepared to pay £30 and that's what I expect to pay, if it goes over £30 I lose"

I see it as "I'm prepared to pay £30, but if I can maximise my chance to get it for £10 I will but if it goes over £30 I lose".

 

More or less there Olly. The hunched comment wasn't in response to you.

I have to say i'm not paying over the odds. I am not paying more than i think it is worth so i can't be paying over the odds at all Paul.

Basically you may possibly take advantage of someone not using the system right. If everyone did the same as me then there would be no advantage to sniping. There is no pint trying to snipe me for instance, i still don't care.

You may possibly get one over on someone not immediately putting their max bid in but you don't know for sure whether you have or not. As i said Schroedingers Cat really. I have shown i bid early and got the item for 99p. I could have bid late, done the same and congratulated myself for not flagging it up.

Alternatively i might have put someone off because they saw that there was already interest and they moved on to one that didn't have a bidder.

The fact is you can't prove or know for sure whether sniping works. If you want to convince yourself it does, and with people who haven't entered their max bid but bid it will work a little, however you don't know how many others are doing exactly the same thing as you so it could all be pointless.

You can't prove it is better or works because there are too many factors outside your knowledge or control and that is a fact.

Regarding dodgy bids and then retractions, i'm pretty sure eBay will be monitoring your IP address and a random proxy server will attract attention from them if you do it a lot. They will look for these patterns so while it is good in theory it is quite dodgy and i doubt you have ever actually done it and/or do it regularly.

5t.

 

I'm with Olly and Paul. Bid late and use a sniping tool most of the time, or sometime see how late you can leave it, given you have to type your bid, confirm it, then type your password and press enter - without missing out on the item.

For me, a sniping tool means it can do it way quicker than I can, it knows my limit because I have already put one in there, and if I pay the $2 (on the system I use) it will be with 3 secs left. Then I know I'll either win or will not (which is a pretty stupid thing to say, but I mean I'll win it because I got in at the last moment, but if someone else bid higher, good on them and more fool me).

In most cases, eBayers expect to get an item cheaper. I hate looking at an item and seeing more people bidding against each other over the days. Makes we want to hit them (not literally), so being so stupid. wait love, wait, until it gets nearer the time, instead of driving up the price and thus egging people on to paying more.

You want an item are willing to pay £15. You go in with three days to go and it's at £16, you have time to rethink - as well as have the opportunity to realise that someone else must want it to and therefore it must still be good value, so I had best not lose it for the sake of a few quid. After all, what's another quid...

And so it goes on.

Leave it to a sniping tool, hit refresh countless times over the last 30 seconds and smile (most of the time). That's fun nailing people at the last minute knowing they are thinking 'where the heck did he come from'.

Love it...

 

That's the only reason. Silly people will battle it out. Sensible people will simply look for the next one on the list.

Lots of things on ebay aren't that cheap once you factor in postage anyway. It is rather over hyped.

5t.