I was bidding against two Korean bidders on Tradera for a beautiful Primus 1001 tonight. I put in a hefty max bid about a minute before the auction ended and watched the seconds counting down to zero with me in the lead, but when the page updated showing that the auction had ended, I found to my surprise that a chap named Hiro_44 had managed to sneak in a bid so late that it was invisible to me! Not sure yet whether shock or relief is the dominant feeling :o This is what I missed:
I think you have misunderstod the bidding system. The winner do not necessarily outbid you in the last minute personally. He can have made a high bid for a week ago and do not even look at the auction when it ends. The system bids for him until the end. Only if you overbid his maximum bid you will win. In my opinion it is completely meaningless to look at the auction in the last minutes because you will be outbid. I usually give a high bid, the highest I can accept for the item and them I will see if I win or not. Michael
That's pretty much all you can expect these days. I saw that lantern, among a couple of others that the same seller had out, and guessed it would be expensive. I've more or less given up on online auctions as I don't have as much money as some of the collectors these days.
I do not agree. If I put in a bid and the site shows I am winning, that means I have outbid the others at that time. Hiro's higher bid was placed after my bid, so close to the end time of the auction that the page did not even display it and thus gave me no opportunity to increase my bid before the end. We're talking maybe a second or two here. I was sniped, pure and simple. I don't blame him; he was simply using better tools than I was. I checked up afterwards and now know that there are online automated sniping services for Tradera too and not just for ebay.
Phil Aside from my ?joke about bird species, I too occasionally use a bidding service for things that I want to bid on at inconvenient times. I do have to be a bit careful about my dodgy Internet access where I live, though - so I set my 'snipe' to take that into account. Cheers Tony
If you put in your maximum bid and get sniped, you've simply been outbid. If a sniper prevents you from increasing your 'maximum bid', then your maximum bid wasn't actually your maximum bid. Terry
Hiro's max bid in his sniping service was undoubtedly more than my max bid entered manually a minute before the close. I was outbid fairly. But with sniping, the timing can be so close to the cutoff that manual bidders have no chance of upping their max bid. I suppose the solution would be to to have your max bid high enough to start with. Me, I'm going to snipe next time...
Tony, the online sniping services will be more reliable for you than a sniping program on your PC. For one, the time will be accurate to the millisecond.
On eBay, unless I am using the 'Buy It Now', I always use a sniping service. For many years I have used the web-based 'Bidding Scheduler'. It is a totally free service and is very reliable. http://www.biddingscheduler.com/ When bidding on an item I enter the maximum amount I would be prepared to pay and then just forget about it. My bid is entered a few seconds before the auction end. If I do not win then I am quite happy because the winning bid was more than I was willing to pay. In fact I can not see any positive benefits for ever doing manual bids.
Yeah, Bidnapper worked for me, too, but it costs quite a bit. Trevor put me onto Bidding Scheduler years ago and I've used that ever since - and as he says, it's completely free. It's let me down just twice over the years. The first time was when it didn't enter a bid and I didn't win an item I probably would have. I shot off a complaint and I was amazed to get an apology and an explanation that they'd been doing some development work and passwords containing the '&' character weren't accepted for a few hours. Unfortunately, the auction ended during that period. The second time was when all users lost service for a few hours due to some glitch with the server. But twice in probably ten years for a completely free service is damned good, I reckon...
Thanks, Trevor! I shall certainly use biddingscheduler for any ebay auctions. For Tradera, there is another non-free website which currently has Tradera listed as a beta testing destination for free.
