Why the last second bid....................

[Steve D]

I completely agree with the OP's mantra of ""never feel you have to have an item" or you will pay too much". That is one of the big reasons I snipe. I place my snipes with about 5-7 seconds left in the auction. This way, I don't give anyone a chance to bid me up, and I also don't give myself an opening to up my bid once I've placed it. It does hurt when I place a bid of say $50, and see the high bid go to $50.17, but those are the breaks.

Unfortunately, many bidders don't share this mantra. They get into the "got to have it" mentality, and go crazy with their bids. It's I guess not too dissimilar to gambling.

Perhaps a good example is where a specific item is put on ebay, at a BIN price. It fails to get any takers at that price. After a few days, the seller puts the item back on ebay, this time in a straight auction starting at say, 99 cents. When the auction ends, the item gets a high bid well in excess of it's previous BIN price.

It's a case where everyone seeing the BIN price, considers it too expensive, and they have no price history to go off of to tell them otherwise. Once they see other bidders placing bids on it at or above the previous BIN price, they feel more comfortable bidding higher.

Steve