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

[Zach Wheat]

Originally Posted by egbeachley

Why I use a sniping service.

About 8 years ago I bid around $200 for a nice item. It was at $20 or so with 10 minutes remaining. A new bidder bid $30 and was outbid by me, of course. Then he put in $40. Then $50. Then $60 and so on until he was the high bidder at $205 when he stopped and won it.

If I sniped, he would have probably stopped at $30 and I would have won it at the next bid increment (assuming no other bidders).

And the reason you often win at your exact price is because of the bid increments. If you put in a bid of $40.27 and another bid comes in at $40, you win it at $40.27 even though the bid increment is supposed to be $1.

Ed, I agree and this is another reason I submit last second bids for items I want. I was purchasing some business software a few weeks ago. I researched final auction prices from previous auctions. There happened to be a dozen sellers listed on eBay all at reasonable prices. I put in reasonable max bids and was out bid in the last minute on all of them. Finally, I decided to manually snipe one of the auctions. I chose an auction that ended at an odd time and won the auction for less than my max bids on the previous auctions and ended up saving perhaps 10%.

MWheat