Sniper bidding software on eBay, what works?

[JCinPA]

So I lost a pipe when I had a $75 bid in BidSlammer to a $58 bidder. This has happened twice. I used another software before, and apparently you have to be online and watching it at the time the auction stops. I put this in then had dinner thinking it would work.

What bidding software will work if I'm offline? I want to put a bid in and shut my computer down and go away for a week and know that my bid will be submitted. Is there such a program?

Thansk.

 

[luvmysuper]

@JCinPA
Ebay has restructured bidding to reduce the effectiveness of sniping programs.
You put in your max bid, and it will only increase your bid by the minimum amount over your competitors if you are outbid.
It will not bid higher than your max amount, so you have to plug in the true max amount you are willing to ultimately spend.
If there is a higher amount put in by your competitor at the last second, you still win if your max amount is higher, and was put in earlier than your competitors max amount.

 

[JCinPA]

Thanks, Phil. I actually did win my last auction. I'm too stupid to know how it works.

 

[luvmysuper]

Thanks, Phil. I actually did win my last auction. I'm too stupid to know how it works.

It's a complex thing and I think they make stuff hard to understand on purpose.

 

[Kentos]

I use EZsniper.

The benefit of a sniping program is to get the item at the least cost to you. If someone else wants to pay more for it than you, you will not win the auction.

The way it works is let’s say there is a pipe at the bid of 20.00. If you bid it up to 25.00, the other guy bids it up to 30.00, you bid it to 35.00 etc. Eventually it gets to your max price of 100.00, and you win it.

Now if you are lucky, and your opponent doesn’t have a max bid in, and he doesn’t use a sniping program , you put in a snipe of a 100.00 and let it sit. At the end of the auction your max bid is submitted, and you get it for 25.00. You opponent has no time to put in a higher bid.

Now if he put in an eBay bid of 90.00 you would get it for 95.00ish, if he had a bid if 100.00 he would win as his bid was in before your snipe.

My strategy is to snipe several auctions with either no bid, or low bid, and hope I win one or two.

 

[JCinPA]

Yeah, I'm just not understanding it. But I won the auction! A nice-looking Danish from Stanwell at a good price. Hope it matches the photos.

 

[nortac]

Gixen. Works pretty good, but you can still lose a bid. Like @Kentos , my recent successful bid on two Falcons was the result of bidding on a few different pipes, eventually winning one auction and later canceling some snipe bids on auctions that had not been completed. Unlike a straight forward auction bid, you can easily cancel a snipe before the auction ends.

 

[Kentos]

If you really want something gotta put in a super high bid lol. On a estate I really want I usually bid the current retail price, tho most time the highest they go is 70% of retail.

 

[luvmysuper]

You have to choose the items you really want, then put in the absolute max you are willing to pay, then walk away till it's done.

 

[Whisky]

I think the newer eBay algorithm works a lot like a sniping program. I just put in how much I’m willing to pay and turn on alerts. The eBay program will bid for you up to your max amount. Is someone bids more than your max you get a text letting me know and you can decide if it’s worth more money to you and raise your max bid if you want to. No one else knows what your max amount is except you. I “accidentally” won 3 pipes the other day because no one bid more than my set max amount which I felt was pretty low.

Only draw back is that as far as I know you can’t cancel you max bid once it’s made.

 

[Kentos]

The only thing a stand-alone sniping program has that the eBay system doesn’t have is preventing a possible bid war between 2 people, thereby possibly driving up the final price. If two people put in auto bids of 100 for a 20.00 item, eBay will auto bid the price up to 100.00. With a snipe the price stays at 20.00 till seconds before the end of the auction. Sometimes it works in your favor, sometimes it doesn’t. On a popular items sniping doesn’t do much as everyone is sniping lol. On obscure mislabeled items like a Gilette Fatboy or a Old Peteson pipe, you can get a great deal sometimes. Even better are the 20.00 items with no bid. For some reason people find items that other people bid on as more desireable than an item with 1 day left that no one bid on.

 

[luvmysuper]

Bearing in mind that if you snipe a $30 item at the last second with a $50 bid, and the competition has a max bid reserve of $51, he wins.
And you never know what his max is.

 

[nortac]

Ebay also has a scale of bid increments based on the item price and that changes as the price increases due to bidding/sniping. So a bid increase that would win the auction at a lower price, may not be enough to win the final price that the item is bid up to. So even if your snipe/bid is a dollar more than a previous bid/snipe, that may not be enough to win the auction based on the final price and resulting bid increment required.

 

[AimlessWanderer]

I don't bid anymore. If something is Buy It Now at the right price, I'll take it. Otherwise, I don't have the patience anymore. It's partially due to snipers, but mainly due to not wanting to wait several days, before I know whether I need to go elsewhere, to get what I need. I'd much rather click BUY and know I can now stop looking, than click BID and not know whether or not to keep shopping.