Should eBay sniping be against the rules and should sniping software be too?

^This.

 

what sniping software to people use?

 

I don't understand how this is ethically questionable territory. If you've bid the maximum you're willing to pay and you're outbid, then so be it. Why does the time that it happens matter?

 

I believe I do.

 

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=bid+sniper

 

auctionstealer
hammersnipe
To name a couple.

They are ideal for people who want to just set an amount they are willing to pay and forget about it and deal with life's pains and pleasures.

 

Some people get p*ssed because it looks so promising and then there are bids in the last 5 seconds.

 

Nix. The best option for the seller is the nuclear snipe, where two people unknown to each other separately look at a $20 item and say to themselves "I will own this. It might only worth about $20, but I will put $200 into my snipe program and certainly win against all comers because nobody else will be crazy enough to bid anywhere near enough to beat me". As a seller I've been on the receiving end of this and it's sweet like shoo-fly pie.

 

How do you know ????

 

Look at the list of bids on the item, it tells you the time and date of all the bids. It really is that simple!

 

Sniping keeps the price down for items that I must have and for which I'm willing to pay anything. If I placed a bid of 500 bucks for a pocket watch worth 20 at the start of an auction, I'd likely be paying close to a hundred by the time it closes. If I use a sniping tool and bid the same amount 10 seconds before close, I'll pay closer to 20.

 

Thanks to "The voice of reason".

 

Maybe he is a seller?

 

I bid close to the end of the auction to deal with knuckleheads that just bump up the price on an item at the last few minutes. Why do these folks make multiple bids bumping up the price of an item by $5.00 a shot with multiple "losing bids". Just bid your top offer and be done with it already. I bid close to the end of the auction to avoid these idiots.

Nothing unethical about it at all.

 

This type of bidding is one of the best example of buyer bidding stupidity. I'll pay $15, no $20, no $22...

Virtually guaranteed to drive the price of an item up, beyond it's normal price. Bidding wars don't always show typical market prices either so I'm surprised you don't have an issue with them since you feel sniping does show true market value.

If a high bidder is beaten, he'll likely be beaten regardless of when the other higher bid is placed.

What this sounds like to me is that you tend to bid below market value hoping to get a deal even though you'd be willing to pay more. But since someone puts in a bid in the last few seconds you lose out since you don't have time to increase your bid.

 

http://snip.pl/en/auction-sniper.php

 

Do you think none of us understand how eBay works? It really is pretty simple. Most of us are well aware of how it runs.

 

I think the thing that is really "unnatural" about the way ebay works is the proxy bidding. In "real" auctions your bid is your bid, not the bid that is just an incremental amount added by the system to the second highest bid. Is that high bid of $50.00 really a bid for $50.00 or really a bid for $500.00 lurking behind a $50.00 bid.

 

Um yeah....so just let the auction continue on and on and on and on and.... until someone stops upping there bid by 51 cents.

 

What indicates the bid was made by a sniper site though ? I've manually had the winning bid at one second, more than once. Is the colored star and asterisked-out name not visible ?

 

I don't think there is a way to tell if a snipe bid was from a bot or not. A manual snipe bid and a bot snipe bid would appear the same.

 

Thank you. So people are assuming it's a sniper bid, if they're beaten in the final 5 seconds ?

 

I don't see anything unethical about sniping. I don't buy that much on eBay but when I do and it isn't a buy-it-now item, I almost always use sniping software. As others have written, it's convenient just to enter one's maximum bid and then have the software place that bid for you in the final few seconds of the auction. I've got better things to do with my time than keep track of when an auction closes and then make sure I'm on eBay's site entering my bid at the right time (sniping manually) and I found I was generally not getting items that I wanted when I entered bids too early.

 

Exactly.