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Sniping and Multiple Bids

Sniping and Auction Sniper

See also the article Buying on eBay 

Sniping is allowed on eBay and other bidding systems. It involves putting in a bid just before the end of the auction and so close, that others cannot get another bid in. However people using snipes can only outbid you if you are bidding up each step yourself, and unless they have set their snipe above a proxy bid, the proxy bid either higher or equal will win.

Unless you have a lot of experience, don't try to do this yourself as many times your bid will not arrive in time before the end of the sale. Instead subscribe to a sniping service, this charges you a small amount on wins and nothing for attempts and reports what has happened. You may get a number of free wins to allow you to get used to the service.

Sniping programs also allow you to set up snipes in advance and modify them up to a few seconds or minutes before they are placed. You can therefore change your mind and change the amount you want to bid or cancel it.

Snipping programs also may have bid groups, with this you say how many items you want to purchase and keep adding more snipe entries to the group, each bid is then placed until you have the number of items you specified. Useful if you want to search for a bargain where a number of them are being sold in that you can set it up to snipe each of them until one wins. Some programs may also have other facilities to log purchases and sales, pulling information from eBay. When using groups remember to look at the P&P charges on each item before placing your bid, rather than just entering a blanket price for all items, its the total cost that is of interest and sometimes the post and packing charges can vary considerably for the same items.

A small number of sellers don't like snipes, but most will realize that it also increases the number of bids, as a person may intend to come back and bid later but not get around to it, so automating their bid allows them to not forget to bid.

If you are selling a number of identical or similar items its a good idea not to finish them all at the same time, as people using bid groups will only be able to enter one of them, so one item may then go far lower where the snipe may have first caused the price to rise on a proxy bid, although not winning but increase and win the second item.  As a seller you will get to spot that snipes often do not win, where people have researched the market and have set it the low side of a bargain, but cause the other proxy bids to go up, so increase the sale value to you. As a seller I am delighted people do use snipes.

I make a lot of use of a sniping service called Auction Sniper and suggest if sniping interests you, you may like to take a look, if you click on the logo you can register for free and get a number of free snipe wins to get you going.

A Tip: Copy the eBay item number by selecting and right mouse button,  copy and paste in the number to the auction sniper box to make sure you don't make a mistake in typing the number.

If you want to include an auction sniper button as above on your site, eBay page etc here is is the html code to do so.

<a href='http://www.auctionsniper.com/?how=videoarchitect' target='_blank'><img src='http://www.auctionsniper.com/images/button3.gif' border='0' alt='AuctionSniper.com - Bid at the last second, automatically'></a>

See Also:

Buying on eBay 

Buying Wisely

FreeCycle

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