Comment by Retr0id
15 hours ago
I've bought hundreds of things on ebay over the years and I've never understood the issue with "sniping".
Sure, I've been outbid at the last moment. Losing an auction is always a little frustrating. But if I was willing to pay that price I should have bid it myself. Feels fair enough?
And I prefer to use sniping bots because they let me revise my bid all the way up until the auction ends. If I put a bid on something and then sleep on it and decide I don’t actually want to pay that much, I can lower my bid or cancel it. If I bid with eBay directly then I loose that flexibility. It has nothing to do with trying to outsmart people or be sneaky.
I run up the prices in less competitive auctions just for fun occasionally, especially if I think someone is getting too good a deal.
Question: what kind of fun you are referring to here?
Since, from the outside, it surely sounds like you get pleasure by inflicting some form of suffering on others. But that hopefully isn’t considered fun, is it?
The price, when between the seller's minimum and the buyer's maximum, is a zero sum game. So while this is definitely screwing with people, the seller gets paid more and the amount of suffering in the world shouldn't really change.
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I don't think this is inflicting net suffering, really. The money doesn't just disappear, the seller gets it. Auctions are zero-sum.
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You are not fun.
Do you usually pay for the higher price you are offering?
I mean, dick move, but that has nothing to do with sniping. You could do that at any point during the auction and it would have the same effect.
Sniping means that bidders may have decided to put in a higher ceiling in order to avoid losing at the last second.
If there was never a worry about this, they could bring out (and decide) that ceiling only after being outbid.
why would you bid the highest price you can afford in an auction? the seller agreed to auction the thing; they could have just offered it for a set price.
Do you not know how ebay works? You put in the maximum price you're willing to pay, and if you win you're paying 2nd highest bid + 1. So you don't save any money by starting with a low bid.
From what I've seen discussed, it seems some percentage of "sniping" is to attempt to obtain both "winning bid" and "lowest possible price" (note, not the same as "max willing to pay for the same item"). The sniper is trying to hide interest, so as not to attract other interested bidders, and therefore grab "a great deal" of a small increment above the starting bid price.
And this probably appears to work enough times in the snipers favor to trick them into thinking it is a winning strategy, whereas they likely would have won the same auctions in the end by just bidding that 'minimum' as their maximum bid. But as they can't easily (i.e., without expense) A/B test their strategy, they get no feedback that sniping isn't really helping them like they think it is helping them.
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