Thread: sniping blues
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Old 07-14-2016, 09:14 PM
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Mike
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Join Date: May 2009
Location: Louisville, KY
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Default Odd coincidence

Quote:
Originally Posted by darwinbulldog View Post
I use Gavelsnipe for almost all of my eBay bidding, and they're more reliable than my attempts at manual sniping ever were, so no complaints there; but lately I've been getting burned on a lot of cards that I would have won using the old-fashioned bidding process.

The last five auctions I set snipes for I was outbid by a TOTAL of $0.96. It's an astonishing statistical aberration, but nothing especially remarkable about it otherwise. Just a short run of bad luck, but I'm thinking I might go back to putting in my bids as soon as possible and seeing how they turn out, at least for items under $100 or so. Anybody else do that -- snipe the expensive stuff but just bid right away on everything else? It's just so easy to set a snipe that I never bothered to put much thought into whether the costs might outweigh the benefits. Certainly they have for me over the past few days.
Hey Glenn

I've had similar, possibly related experiences a year or so ago. After losing a couple auctions just like you described, I figured something was funny. So ... after putting my snipe in a few days before the auction ended, I upped it less than an hour before the auction ended, and by a couple increments. I tried that approach on three or four auctions, and won 3. The one I lost was by a large margin, with multiple higher bidders.

These were auctions in the $125 - $350 range if I recall, and always set snipes on odd increments, like $186.71. So ... I was surprised when I won two of those auctions by the next higher increment, and there was a bid a few cents higher than what I'd originally bid.

I never raised an issue about it, thinking I was being a little paranoid ... maybe not so much, now.

Sound a bit curious, no?

--
Mike
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