Seller's on EBAY Playing Games??

What's a snipe Brenda??

I log on to the snipe website when I want to bid on something. I enter that is an ebay auction and the max I want to bid. When there are 10 seconds left the bid is placed for me. I don't bid often but I have never lost a sniped one yet.
I use Hammersnipe and get 15 free snipes per month. And it's free! You do have to give all your ebay info and passwords to the snipe site though. My family has been using hammersnipe for years with no problems, and every bid was won!

http://hammersnipe.auctionstealer.com/info.cfm

Brenda

Yeah, I've found that the only real cure for the ebay bug is Neopets.

You'd be surprised at how many of us "old ladies" frequent there! It's one of those places that have something for everyone. It's free but gives enough satisfaction to shoppers, collectors, auction goers, gamers, etc to stay away from ebay. My VISA bill says I should make a point to go check my stock market prices at Neopets instead of the new masks at ebay...

The snipe site may explain how my sniping plans often lose out.
The newbies to ebay will enter the auction days ahead and run the bidding up.
They evidently do not realize it is the last and biggest bid that wins.

What I do is to decide the MAXIMUM I am willing to pay and watch the clock tick down anad enter this price at the last possible second.
Sometimes I am too late and if another person outbids me, it is too late to go back and up your bid.
Works lots of times and I have no way to know if I am bidding against a snipeservice, only that I try to cut it thin.

I have bought about 110 items from ebay.
I wonder why a bid does not extent the auction byu 10 minutes the way the old UBID site did. It was only after then 10 minutes -I think 10- passed and there was no more bids.

This would stop the snipes and be great for the seller, but not for the buyer.
Guess ebay has their reasons.

Bet we all slept better last night than Mike Nifong.
And the shame is that it happens many more times than we can know.

Yes, ther are cases of buyers logging on and upping the bid. I've caught a couple of them out but it takes a lot of time/research to find them. The one instance was a person who was selling car DVD bags that would hold a portable DVD player on the back headrest as well as serve as a carrying bag. I found them on a website for about $56. I noticed that no matter what this seller's items always went for about $59. There was one instance where he did let a bag go for 30, must have been asleep at the wheel that night.

But, what I did was to go into the bid history of items he had sold (you can find in Search all items a buyer has sold) and looked for user names with 0 or 1 feedback who had bid up the items. Then went back and searched on all items those users had bid on (won or not). Found that sometimes the jerk got stuck with the items, and even in those cases he would still use that other ID to bid on the exact item again to drive bids up.

Needless to say, I bought from the fixed price store even if it was a couple dollars more.

Now, this was only one seller for one item. This is not usually the case. I did report him to Ebay. Don't know if he's still around. Most of the sellers there are honest.

You also have the reverse. For instance we were selling a used laptop. Someone used buy it now and paid MORE than our BIN price and asked it be shipped overnight to another address as it was a birthday present for his friend. The funds went through Paypal, but a seller has no protection if it's not sent to the confirmed address. I wrote the buyer back and told him we needed to send it to a confirmed address or he had to pay via another form. Never heard back. Relisted the item. Had many bids or bid attempts from Indonesia, Phillipines, or other out of country bidders asking the same. Even though we had the rule on there that no foreign sales, no bidders with negative or less than 10 feedback, etc.

Computers and big ticket items are the ones that get scammed the most. So it's both buyer and seller beware.

We have also used a bidsniper software for items we really wanted. Set your limit and sit back. If I don't get it for my limit, then c'est la vie. Most of my e-bay experiences have been good ones. Only one or two bad. As a seller I can tell you there are sometimes I have wondered about the sanity of some buyers. I've seen where people pay way more for something used than they could have bought it for new. Like Bowflex items. When I was looking into them many times I saw people overpay for used ones. They could have gotten them new at Bowflex.com for less. I just would shake my head and move on...

Deltaseeker,

Glad you had good experience with reporting people to ebay management.

I reported someone for advertising a used instrument as a model that, looking at the picture, it clearly wasn't. Major, major difference in price (retail new model to model). I am very very familiar with this particular instrument.

I notified Ebay management after the seller refused to correct the listing when I mentioned it to him. Ebay management told me that they could not do anything as I was not the winning bidder and been scammed. (Like I would bid just so I could be scammed and then fix it?)

I sent EBAY the link to the listing, and a link the the Yamaha web site showing both instruments in question. Still no interest by Ebay. Pretty obvious if you know what you are looking at.

Really sad that someone may have gotten scammed and THEN will have to try to make it right, when I gave EBAY the right info up front before the auction was over and they refused to look into it.

I am always cautions buying on EBAY.

Wow, I understand now that I'm REALLY out of my league.
My very first experience with online auctions was just last week. I was trying to help my brother get a CPAP machine. We found the right one at Yahoo, placed a bid, and less than 24 hours later the auction was cancelled!
According to Yahoo, my brother "won" the auction, but the seller refused to sell it to him.
It seems that someone made a deal with the seller and didn't even bother to bid.
Oh well. I need to get him onto CPAP, but I guess we'll just have to find some other way of getting a machine. It seems that auctions aren't really working as I thought they did. Stupid me.

Now that Yahoo is gone, we need a p2p sales listing. Any suggestions where to look next?

LyleHaze

Try craigslist

you may have to go to several l;arge cities, but many are there and some bargains

I got burned by a seller playing shenangans lately myself...

Was bidding on some binoculars, and they were eventually up to $92. I bid maximum of $100, and was the winning bidder at $94 until 10 seconds before the end of the auction. A 0 history bidder outbid me at $110.

Then 5 minutes after the auction I get a "2nd chance" notification at... you guessed it $100. Way too soon for the real bidder to back out of the deal.

What happens is that at the end of the auction, it shows everybodies bids, including their maximum (except the winner), so the seller knew my maximum price and tried to sell it to me at that price.

Shady pool, I didn't bite (to teach him a lesson, he blew the sale for $6 of profit - numpty).

Rob

jabberwock wrote:What's a snipe Brenda??

Sniping is a very common practice on ebay. In short, it's the practice of sellers swooping in with a high bid at the end of an auction so others don't have time to counter.

Bidding early only drives up the price. Sellers know this. That's why they will sometimes take the gamble of listing an item with a low start price. They're counting on an early bidding war.

That's why whenever I'm serious about wanting something, I watch the auction but don't bid yet. (ebay sends you an email reminder when an auction you are watching is about to close.) I set my limit, then when the time comes, I log in, type that number into the "bid" screen, watch the clock, and hit the "place bid now" button as close to the end of the auction as I feel comfortable. I've won auctions that way and I've lost auctions that way.

Doug.

Lyle,

Are you a CPAP user yourself? If so get your brother one using your prescription from an online dealer.

geoDoug wrote:

jabberwock wrote:What's a snipe Brenda??

Sniping is a very common practice on ebay. In short, it's the practice of sellers swooping in with a high bid at the end of an auction so others don't have time to counter.

That's partially incorrect. Sniping is swooping in at the last minute with a new high bid, but it's usually done by buyers, not sellers. I manually snipe most every auction I win. It's common sense, partially fueled by many bidders who do not know how much they want to pay for an item and also by the "Just a Dime" theory I have:

Let's say you see something you'd like if you can get it for 50 bucks or less. Well, would you pay 50 bucks plus a dime? Probably. Most folks do not have a solid, razor thin line in the sand on price.

Another problem is people get caught up in eBay bidding, and to this day will still pay more (including S&H) for used computer hardware than they can get new.

If you want to win, examine previous auctions for that particular item. See how much total an item went for, including S&H. eBay charges auction fees based solely on the winning bid amount, so some sellers reduce their fee by charging a tiny amount and a big S&H fee. Figure out how good of a deal you can get based on the previous auctions. The longer you can wait, the more auctions you can watch and you can wait out a deal.

Figure out your max bid. Bid it on an item a few seconds before it closes (depending on your net speed you may want to do it a minute early if you are on dial-up). If you don't get it, oh well, better luck next time.

Also watch feedback. Check it very carefully. eBay has many scammers, and eBay seems reluctant to hunt down obvious ones. Make sure your seller has feedback from selling plenty of items, and not just ones that sell for a buck or two. It's very helpful if your seller has positive feedback from somebody who bought a similiar item to the one you'd like to purchase.

Reference Wiki on Sniping:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auction_sniping

TGregg wrote:That's partially incorrect. Sniping is swooping in at the last minute with a new high bid, but it's usually done by buyers, not sellers.

Doh! I knew that. Brain fry. Thanks for the correction.

Doug.