I tried hard to add to the hoard last night. I had 6 bids set up in my sniper program. Five of the 6 got outbid by one bid increment. The other was outbid by two increments. I was hoping to win 2 or 3. I guess I have values dialed in pretty well. Somebody else overbid. . . . Z
It happens. Stick to your guns though, you never know if it's the lister bidding up their own stuff. You win some you lose some but no reason to overpay either.
A sniping program can be useful if your bid is close to the true value of an item, but if you're trying to win an auction for a lower value, you're likely to lose more often than not.
They've been around for a loooooong time. A good sniping program will usually post your bid about 3 seconds before the end of the auction. By the time it is recorded, it's too late for anyone other than someone whose current bid is less than their max bid. When I was actively buying, I won about 85% of the time. Sometimes, I'd be involved in 50+ auctions at a time, and you don't have to follow any of them. Your sniping program will notify you if you have won or have been outbid.
Caution: Beware of the logical fallacy of "lost-by-just-one-bid-increment". You never know what the max bid was of the winner. Even if the underbidder (who finished 2nd) would have bid multiple increments higher, the highbidder (who won the coin) still would have won if their bid was higher. This came to my attention years ago when I bid $300 for a coin on eBay that was worth every penny of that. I won for just a little over $100. I was thrilled! Shortly later I got an email from a friend who, unbeknownst to me, also wanted that coin and had himself set a snipe on it for $100. He was bemoaning the fact that he had lost "by just one bid", and that "if only" he had bid just a little higher he WOULD have won it. Uhhh... no... he would not have. Postlude: Because eBay quasi-disguises the winner's eBay handle, and because I didn't have the heart to tell him it was I who won the coin, to this day he doesn't know. :-o
How does that work though? What if the winning bidder is a mule account, they'd have to relist the item and it only serves to waste your own time selling it. One of the reasons I don't believe that's a thing.
