Win your ebay item bid with auction sniping

Sniping is the practice of using specialist sites to place your bid for you, in the closing seconds of an auction – typically, within 7 seconds of th end. Others bidders who may have been prepared to outbid you do not get the chance to do so, because by the time they’ve noticed your bid, the auction has ended in your favour.

Sniping’s main advantage over standard eBay bidding is that you do not disclose your interest in the auction at any stage. If a rival bidder sees no bids at all for an item they are interested in, they may be fooled into thinking nobody else is interested, and enter a lowball bid. They then lose the auction to your snipe in the dying seconds.

Eg Manual Bidder sees an item worth £20 and a starting bid of £0.99, but with a few hours to go there are no bids. So he gets all cheap and proxy-bids £5. He now leads the bidding at £5 but the bid displayed is the £0.99 starting bid.

With say 7 seconds to go, Snipe Bidder’s bid of £10 goes in and immediately the bidding rises to £5.50 – Manual Bidder’s maximum plus the bid increment. Snipe Bidder wins the auction at £5.50, and Manual Bidder, who thought the item worth £20, loses.

Snipes are normal proxy bids, so if someone is prepared to pay more than you they will still win, but if they have trid to be cheap, your snipe will simply go in as their highest bid plus the minimum bid increment.

The two auction sniping services I use (and can refer you to, if you’d like us both to gain some free snipes) are www.auctionsniper.com and www.bidnip.com. The former charges per snipe, the latter per block of snipes (but in each case you pay only if you actually win). I never buy any other way and placing snipes is very easy – you just download the sniping tool and right-click on any auction.

The drawback of these two sites is that you have to give them your eBay login details so they can log in as you to place your bids. For those who are uncomfortable with this, you can also buy downloadable snipe packages which don’t require this – but unlike the above two, such sniping tools require your own PC to be switched on and online.

Academic research referenced in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auction_sniping suggests that auction sniping saves bidders money.

Did you have an ebay account? If not click here to get one and click on sign up button at the op of ebay page