[Exhibitman]

I use auctionstealer's subscription service and have found it to be 100% reliable.

I don't know whether someone will shill me on any given auction but I know for sure that if I use a sniper they will not shill me unless they snipe their own auction. I suppose that is possible, but is it likely someone would do so? I think not. I think it is far more likely that someone would see an early bid and start pecking away at it to see how high it is.

I also put in soft early bids and set a hard ceiling snipe to cover myself later on, either to kill a BIN that I don't want to take or to make sure the seller is aware that there is interest in the item so he doesn't panic and take someone else's off-ebay offer.

Another reason I like sniping is bid groups, which allows me to set bids on a number of similar items with the later bids automatically terminated without being placed if I win the first one. Great when a seller posts two of the same card that I want.

As for precision of shilling and sniping, I know that for the items I collect I have often set a snipe that ended up within a dollar or two of the final price. I feel pretty good at handicapping results on items that interest me, so I do not have difficulty believing that someone else could analyze things and come up about where I am. The reason I see that more with Ebay than a regular auctioneer is that the increments are so small. As for putting in a max and leaving it, I do that but only in regular auctions. In a regular auction I will analyze the bidding structure and try to choose a tier at which I think the next increment would be painful for a competitor and grab that level early on. One item I saw recently had a $800 tier (plus vig, of course), and I would have been pleased to own the item at that price, meaning that the next tier after that would require a buyer to commit over $1,000 to the item, which I thought was a psychological barrier that would not be broken, and which meant that I would be at over $1,300 for the item if I chose to top that, which I had no intention of doing, so I grabbed the $800 tier early in the auction and won.