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

[Big Ben]

Originally Posted by HRBAKER

If you are talking about ebay in particular a lot of it is distrust of the anonymity of the system. If I am willing to pay $300 for something that has an opening bid of .99, I am not going to put in a $300 proxy bid and subject myself to the seller or friends/accomplice of the seller to run me up to see what the max is/was. I can set a snipe and execute the bid with 5 seconds left and accomplish exactly the same thing IMO. Why risk it. It doesn't make any difference what the max I am willing to pay is, but what I have to pay in as close to an arms-length transaction as I can make up to my max.

Hope that makes sense. To me to put in your max from the start can be like telling the seller what you are willing to pay if the auction is manipulated and I think many, many on ebay are.

Well said. This is the strategy that I use. One thing that I have noticed recently on EBay with collectibles other than baseball cards, is a seller who has a low minimum starting bid at the beginning of the auction and then raises the minimum bid drastically in the final days. After I saw this, I lost any interest that I might have had with the item.