Feek said:
Ahh, but if I'd put on a snipe bid for £120 to be sent just a couple of seconds before the end, you'd not have seen it until it was too late so I'd still have won!
That's true, but it depends on the maximum bids set. The main weakness I can see with sniping software is that it doesn't suit my buying technique. If there's something I want, I decide what the maximum I'm prepared tp pay is, and I bid that. If it goes over that because someone's prepared to pay more, so be it. They obviously wanted it more than I did.
If you set you sniping software to more than my maximum bid, you'd win anyway because you'll pay more than I will. Once I set myself a maximum, that's it.
But, to be honest, I don't use eBay more than VERY rarely, so I'm no expert. The only times I've used eBay is when something comes up that I can't get elsewhere. So far, that's been a small handful of out-of-print books (I'm a collector).
And,
so far, I've yet to lose a single one of this handful of auctions. Why? I guess I wanted the book more than anybody else.
The other disadvantage, in my view, of sniping services (as opposed to local software) is one you've already pointed out .... handing over account details and password. I know these services are widely used and reputable but, none the less, personally, no way in hell am I doing that. Not a chance. If I lose out on something as a result, so be it. This is, of course, an entirely personal reaction.
Feek said:
It's all down to the golden rule of auctions of setting your maximum bid and sticking to it, which a lot of people don't do. They'll bid and rebid over and over again, often going above what they actually wanted to spend.
Precisely. I've seen some astonishing bids in real-life auctions too. Computer equipment, for instance, bought at vastly over-inflated prices. On one occasion, I watched a dozen ex-demo HP printers sell for about £850 each. After the auction, I went about 3 miles down the road to an authorised HP dealer and bought the same machine, brand new, for £650. What on earth these people were doing paying what they did is beyond me.
But psychogically, auctions are dangerous for the novice, precisely for the reason you gave. Bids are in small increments, and it's very easy to add just one, then another, then another
small increment to your bid. Before you know it, you've gone way over your maximum and bid far more than you intended. This applies, I guess, to eBay, but (in my view) is FAR more prevalent at real auctions, where a good auctioneer can hype a couple of novices into a bidding war and build excitement for exactly this purpose. It's the whole auction atmosphere that is seductive, especially is people think they're getting a bargain.
And, in a real auction, a novice bidder has to avoid getting caught up in a bidding war with the auctioneer taking bids off the wall. For those that don't know that term, if an auctioneer sees a noob bidding with enthusiasm, he'll often
invent bids (known as off-the-wall bids) to push the noob further and further (and increase the auction house's fee, of course). This practice, while entirely legal, is rather unethical.
So, the noob gets pushed too far and eventually drops out, if the auctioneer miscalculates and goes too far. The auctioneer is then stuck with a no-sale. So, a few minutes later, someone from the auction house approaches the noob and says that the winning bidder has been unable to complete the transaction, so would the noob like the item at their last bid price? More often than not, the noob even falls for this stunt too, and says yes, because the approach generally occurs soon enough after the auction that the reality of the overbidding hasn't yet sunk in.
Of course, this technique is hard to do on eBay, though there are some similar tricks that a seller can use.
