M635CSi wrote:
Daryl,
Thanks for the correction and clarification. Far be it from me to interfere with Duke and Rich getting some beauty sleep. My sense of how the sniping programs worked was they bombarded the service and locked out other bidders. I know ebay has a system to allow the maximum bid which is what I have done, simply decide my walk away number and bid the smallest increment below that. I've heard tell that sniping programs will stop a win under those circumstances. Does that work against sniping programs and if so, what is the appeal of using a sniping program?
The only appeal of sniping is that it does not allow anyone else to up their bid in response to yours. So it takes the people who fail to submit their top bid out of the equation and can save you some money. In theory with the proxy bidding system that eBay uses sniping should be useless. I have never heard of a sniping program shutting down an auction and I have never been blocked out of bidding on an auction. It is my understanding that a sniping program simply submits a single bid just like an actual person would. I suppose that if there were a bunch of snipers all trying to bid at the same time it could make it hard to get a bid in, but I have never bid on anything popular enough to witness that happen.
DMNaskale wrote:The only appeal of sniping is that it does not allow anyone else to up their bid in response to yours. So it takes the people who fail to submit their top bid out of the equation and can save you some money. In theory with the proxy bidding system that eBay uses sniping should be useless. I have never heard of a sniping program shutting down an auction and I have never been blocked out of bidding on an auction. It is my understanding that a sniping program simply submits a single bid just like an actual person would. I suppose that if there were a bunch of snipers all trying to bid at the same time it could make it hard to get a bid in, but I have never bid on anything popular enough to witness that happen.
That's probably why it didn't make a lot of sense to me. The only times I've bid on an ebay auction I just set it and forget it. ebay can be a great resource, last week I bought one of the old BMW magnetic key alarm systems that was listed as not working. All I needed was the magnetic keys so for $10 and the price of shipping ($15.00) I picked up a couple of keys; I didn't get the alarm keys when I bought my M635CSi.
