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Posted By: Eric Brehm

Sniping doesn't guarantee that you will get the highest bid, only that you will get the last bid. If someone else has placed a higher maximum bid, either through the normal bidding process or by using a sniping program themselves, you will lose the auction. Do you think your snipe won't allow anyone else time to react? Maybe not, but neither will you have time to react if they have already put in a maximum bid that is higher than your snipe amount.

The sane, reasonable thing to do is to bid the maximum amount you are willing to pay for an item, and then walk away. If it sells for more than that, then you shouldn't feel bad. If it sells for less, than you have won the item and again you can be happy.

In those unusual cases where there is an item that is rarely offered for sale, and no one really knows what it is worth, then it may be more difficult to decide in advance what your maximum bid should be. That is one of the reasons people auction certain things off rather than set a fixed take-it-or-leave-it price. But in an auction format like eBay's, with a fixed end time, you still have to come to grips with what your maximum bid is going to be. I think that is really the key to success in any auction.