Comment by BeetleB
15 hours ago
I never understood why eBay set things up to enable sniping.
Many years ago, there was an auction site called uBid. They had the sane rule: Bidding is open as long as there have been bids in the past 5 minutes.
So the end date could be January 24th, 3pm, but if someone bids at 2:58pm, the deadline is extended to 3:05pm. And it keeps going.
You know, like how auctions in the real world work.
> I never understood why eBay set things up to enable sniping.
I've seen studies on auction method that suggest the difference in the final price (between explicit end time and the more traditional extend-until-bidding-stops method) is negligible for online auctions except in a few special cases. This is a marked difference from the expectation that, like a real-world in-person auction, the extending deadline might encourage further spur-of-the-moment bidding.
Whether it makes much difference to the final price or not is immaterial though if the buyers believe that it does. This is one of the (several) reasons why eBay won out against similar competition in the early days: buyers felt they were getting a better deal by being able to snipe so favoured eBay with more of their attention and this brought more sellers to the platform (which attracted more buyers, and so on round the loop). It is telling that to deal with the extra load imposed on the system by external bots refreshing pages and putting in automated bids, instead of switching to an extending auction model they implemented what is almost a built-in sniping feature.
Auction sites have to be very careful (or just very lucky) in their messaging, to convince both sellers and buyers that they are getting a good deal - any major change to how eBay works could upset the balance that they currently have in that regard and start a flood in the other direction (the more people leave, the more other people will think about leaving) to the building toward critical mass that was how they won out in those early days.
In my experience, most purely online auctions, other than eBay, do work that way. Numerous auction houses, for example, including essentially all the major ones, have their auctions online now: when they are hybrid, that involves online live bidding where an online bid will cause the auctioneer in the room to keep the lot open for more bids; when they are "timed" or "online only", times are extended in some way on bids near the deadline. It does, in fact, work much better. There is still an advantage to bidding very late: there is no disadvantage, and it lowers bids in cases of irrational or imperfect opposing bidders. But it limits that process to something that can be done by hand.
eBay really seems to be the only auctioneer using the snipable process it uses.
An alternative to ever extending the deadline is a Dutch auction model, where a bid consists of the maximum price you are willing to pay. It's a bit like integrating the snipping bot in eBay and allowing everyone to use it on fair terms.
For example, suppose the current price is $1 and the current winner is someone who bid $2 as their maximum bid ceiling. If I bid a $3 maximum, then I become the winner at a price of $2.
In this model, there is no need for snipping and those who honestly declare their maximum ceiling from the start are in no disadvantage compared to those who frequently update their bid, nor do they overpay.
Ebay works like this too. But because sniping is still permitted, I like to bid 'uncommon' amounts, like $3.17, so if someone else tried to bid a max of $3.00 even at the last moment, the bid for the few cents more wins.
Unless I’m missing something this is exactly how eBay works. You set a max bid and then it auto bids up to that amount so you can’t get sniped unless they bid higher than your max.
Not that this is perfect either, often it means you can push other people’s bids up to their max even though you have no intention of buying the item. I’ve seen it as a seller and felt bad for the buyers
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This is exactly how eBay bidding works now. Sniping still works because your satisfaction with the outcome of an auction isn’t just determined by “I got the item below my price ceiling” but by _how much_ below my price ceiling I got the item.
Early bids make you commit to matching other bidders’ exploratory bids. You lose out on the (naive) dream of a “great deal”. Sniping (without paid-for bot assistance) is a costless way of not revealing your ceiling until the last moment (and it commits you to actually sticking to your ceiling because there isn’t time to rebid later).
If everyone bid rationally, this wouldn’t matter, but it’s very easy to convince yourself that you can stomach bidding just a little more than your ceiling just to win the item. This cuts two ways: last-minute bids prevent this behavior from others while also stopping it in yourself.
Completely agree with this. It's very odd that the eBay algorithm has a hard stop, as it directly discourages the price from rising when the bidding is hottest, and is absolutely susceptible to sniping.
This is how the popular car auction site bringatrailer.com bidding process works for cars sold on their site too, a quirk of which is that it makes watching the end of the auctions live online kinda fun, especially given the discussions that break out in comment section on each car up for sale while folks nervously watch the current candidate for the final bid cool down.
Much like your example, in the two minutes before the end of the auction, every new bid placed extends the auction clock by another two minutes, the winner hasn't won the auction until two minutes have passed with no further counter bids.
> https://bringatrailer.com/how-bat-works/
AFAIK eBay does do this but I’m not sure if it’s only certain categories or it’s configurable by seller. I’ve definitely seen it happen
That's how whatnot does it as well (what eBay badly copied as eBay live)
This how Trade Me (NZ auction site) works: any bid in the last 2 minutes delays the close time to 2 minutes after the bid. That can happen repeatedly, and I've seen it go on for over 20 minutes on highly contended auctions. It works well.
There are 9 time zones in the US and depending on what your buying in the eu, jp, etc, I'm not going to be up to deal with the end of an auction, either too early too late or you know I have a real efing job and i'm doing something. Having ends of auction require you to be around means you lock out large parts of the market.
It doesn't need to!
If the winner, instead of paying what they bid, pays what the second-highest bidder bid (and bids are secret until someone exceeds them) then the incentives change. Everyone is incented to bid what it is worth to them, safely knowing (1) they won't pay more than that, (2) they will win the auction if no one outbids them, and (3) they won't pay more than necessary to win the auction.
eBay works this way (more-or-less), so you CAN (if you choose to) simply place your bid any time that is convenient and then ignore the timing of the end of the auction and all the sniping bots.
...that's what auctions are...being around to bid...
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For the auction house that is
For the seller.
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This is how Yahoo! Japan Auctions works. If an auction receives a bid in the last few minutes, it is automatically extended.
It works quite well!
Guessing here - but they are probably relying on game theory / auction theory. They have a built in "sniping bot" - by allowing you to type your highest price, and it will auto-bid for you until that price.
The fear of being sniped encourages you to bid your maximum value, and not just wait and see if you can sneak in a lower bid. This is what all auction sites want.
> They have a built in "sniping bot" - by allowing you to type your highest price, and it will auto-bid for you until that price.
With ubid, you also had the feature of letting it bid to your highest price. Yet they still extended the auction if someone outbid your highest price.
Except nobody uses it that way. Auctions are rare themselves. Sellers dont like it, buyers dont like it yet ebay won't change it.
People will pay a premium to win, not everyone but enough to make it worth it.
Another eBay precursor auction side, onsale.com, had the same setup. The auction ended at X date/time or five or ten minutes (I forget which) after the last bid was made.
There is no need for that. They only need to implement a closing auction like stock markets. But eBay hasn't done anything since the 1990's except raise fees.
Nothing? Don't forget when their security team sent pigs heads to people and terrorized them:)
I think I missed this…
> But eBay hasn't done anything since the 1990's except raise fees.
Meanwhile it's now 100% free to sell on eBay for non-professional sellers.
https://www.ebay.co.uk/help/selling/fees-credits-invoices/fe...
They're playing stupid semantic games in order to claim there's no selling fees while still having selling fees. The fees were ostensibly shifted onto the buyer, except they're bundled into the sale price and cut from what the seller receives, so in effect nothing actually changed.
Before: Buyer pays £100, seller receives £100, seller later charged £5 fee, ends up with £95.
After: Buyer pays £100, eBay pockets £5 "buyer protection fee", seller receives £95 with "no fees".
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> it's now 100% free to sell
Nice:
> You won't pay final value fees or regulatory operating fees
Of course, they will likely find some other way to extract their fees.
It would be nice, however, if the final value fee went away for US non-professional sellers.
There does seem to be no indication (at least on the page you linked) of how they define "private seller", which also opens up the possibility of them defining it so narrowly that, say, only five UK residents ever qualify.
Only in the UK, and only on "private sellers". eBay is losing a lot of marketshare in the UK so they've taken drastic measures to try to get people listing again.
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