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Posted By: warshawlaw

One thing folks who deride sniping are forgetting is that with ebay your "name" is out there if you bid early and it can be tracked. I initially started using a snipe program because I learned that there were certain collectors who searched my name as a bidder to see what I was chasing after (mostly in the boxing card arena). They'd let me do the hard work of ferretting out the cards then they'd jump in and take them. To this day when I see something really rare and I want to enter an early bid so that the seller doesn't end run me, I will use a friend's ebay account to bid on it just so I won't be tracked. I also had a malicious collector on my tail who would purposely run up my bids on certain cards, so I had to start sniping. In other words, it isn't that simple when it comes to sniping.

Moving on to the second issue, I see nothing wrong with asking a seller to end it now. I ended a couple of my recent dump day sales early in response to such requests. If I want a specific price and someone offers to meet it directly or offers me a good trade, fine. Business is business. Like it or not, this silliness is big business. Our current poll is a good indicator of that. I don't know how many of you answered the poll honestly, but I really had to think about it for a while before honestly answering that the biggest factor in my purchase decisions nowadays is price. There are precious few cards I can say that I will top all bids on, and there are a lot of cards I regularly bid on that I go after only because the price is right.

I had no involvement in the auctions in question but I also see no reason why a person who gets an auction ended early would have to feel motivated to come in here and get beaten over the head with the sanctimoniousness stick for doing it. Here is a no-surprise factoid about life in the USA in 2006: there is a huge disconnect between the ideals people espouse and the actions they take. It permeates all aspects of public and private life. I spend many hours counseling people who are otherwise good and "moral" to not engage in business practices that are anything but. So someone says it is wrong to end an auction early and then does it? Surprise, they are typical Americans.

I also have a couple of comments for the folks who complain about auctions ending early:

(1) There is no empirical evidence that the sellers who are ending auctions early are ignorant or are not getting as much as they would have if they'd let the sales run to the end. Since the sale ended early, we don't know. You all are assuming that the price was low. It may have been higher than your snipes.

(2) It seems to me that there is a bit of intellectual dishonesty here. If the seller is selling a $200 card for $1,000, no one seems to complain if the listing disappears; it is the $1,000 card with a bid of $200 that is getting everyone's goat. I suspect that much of the teeth-gnashing comes from folks who wanted to snipe that $1,000 card at $500 and are mad that someone beat them to the punch by end-running their snipes.

You don't have to sit there and eat crap on these auctions, folks. A strategy you might try (I do it from time to time) is to put in a bid early on at a very solid price and leave a snipe for your highest price. If I see a card that I want to own for $500, I might bid $400 to protect myself and create a $500 snipe.