Quote Originally Posted by Turnup View Post
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.

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.