I have never understood the point of sniping. If you put in a limit bid then the system will auromatically outbid the current highest bid by the minimum amount. Any further bids and the system will bid again for you by the minimum amount and keep doing that until you either win or hit your limit. Late snipers cannot defeat this because if there is a late bid the system will allow a little more time for more bids. Agreed sniping can defeat those bidders who want to manually make each bid, but only if they are slow or not watching at the close of the auction. A limit bid has the same effect.
True freedom includes the freedom to make mistakes or do foolish things and bear the consequences.
TANSTAAFL
Sniping bids avoid competing against shill bidders
The ‘bay in U.K. and ‘gun in Germany sites don’t have that late bid system you mention.
Although I have seen it on certain European auction sites.
A last second bid of the maximum you are prepared to pay stops other bidders responding by increasing their bids incrementally, which pushes the final price up (which is how some people bid)
You have to know how much your prepared to pay and go all in, and if you’re lucky you’ll win it for less than that.
I think shill bids are just to push the price up so a last second shill bid runs the risk of being the actual winning bid which might defeat the point of it.
Matt
Shill bidders often 'nibble bid' up to just over the highest bid that has been placed. They then withdraw the bid leaving the highest genuine bid in place. The person with that bid will get the item at their highest they bid if it wins. They will not get it cheaper at any of the bid increment stages as the shill bidder has increased those levels.
Bid late and at your highest is sometimes the best way to win an item at the cheapest price
There is absolutely no point in leaving a bid on an item other than until the dying seconds. (Unless of course you can't be 'in at the kill'!)
Bidding early just 'shows your hand', ie interest to other bidders, who may be emboldened by your interest and bid against you accordingly. If you leave a high/max bid early all that happens is that other bidders will, rather stupidly in my opinion, keep upping their own bid until it meets yours, or merely increasing the price somewhat unnecessarily - as has been mentioned.
You often see attractive items for sale with three or four bidders each one leapfrogging the other, so that they can each be 'top dog' in turn. Utterly pointless.
Then a canny buyer comes in with five seconds to go and blows the lot of them away. How many times have I seen that. The only reason for having 5 or 10 day auctions in the first place is to make sure an item is seen by as wide an audience as possible.
Anything I have sold on that was particularly desirable has always seen the final price go stratospheric in the last seconds. Same with items I have bought. My record is from £250 with ten seconds to go, to finish at over a grand. I was well pleased! It wasn't an airgun though.
This is how auctions work. Interested parties compete with each other so that the seller gets the highest price anyone is prepared to pay. Sniping does nothing to change that. Auctions get time extended when there are late bids so a limit bidder still gets another bid in unless it goes over his limit. The possible losers are those who do not limit bid, they just nibble one bid at a time and can therefore get caught napping. Must have not wanted it all that much. Putting in a limit bid does not mean that is the price you end up paying, it's exactly like a comission bid in a conventional auction.
True freedom includes the freedom to make mistakes or do foolish things and bear the consequences.
TANSTAAFL
Of course the bayis an auction like any other, except for the fact that it is time limited. There is no time extension. When that clock runs out there can be no further bids. In an auction room the auctioneer will delay dropping the hammer if he thinks there may be another bid or two yet to come. Not so on the bay . Hence there is no point in bidding early, a bay auction is quite different to a conventional auction in that way.
If 'sniping' did not offer an advantage on occasions then it wouldn't be used as often as it is?
In a conventional auction the lot is up and gone in under a minute usually. On the bay buyers can have up to ten days to mull things over, to enter bids, retract them or increase them. Both types of auction are in detail inherently different, though obviously the concept is similar!
Vintage Airguns Gallery
..Above link posted with permission from Gareth W-B
In British slang an anorak is a person who has a very strong interest in niche subjects.
I once sold a couple of early pellet tins to a guy who was not too far away, so said I would deliver them in my lunch hour.......super place in the sticks, probably 6 figures, anyway I was admiring some of his wonderfull collection of stuff when he said he once paid near £1000 for a vintage treen estate made game carrier (thats two sticks with some notches in and some string with a bit of leather nailed on as a hinge to non shottie readers).
It transpired he would sometimes see something, and if not at the end of the auction would put in a silly bid to make sure he won..on this occasion another bidder did the same
ATB, Ed