Best EBay sniping tool?

[finalidid]

I want to get started sniping.

 

I've read long and hard across the 'net, here at FPN and elsewhere, about the benefits and detriments to "sniping" an EBay auction. Now I'm going to try it out. What's your favorite location / site / tool for sniping? Please feel free to comment about any aspect of sniping.

 

I personally will want a system which is entirely off-line -- I will likely turn my own computer off, and not have it running while the auction is ending, so it's all up to my sniper's computer and internet connection to make it work out for me. In addition I will want not to have to enter too much personal information at the sniping site. The less they know about me, the better. I'm happy to create a new (fake) user name, linked to some new anonymous email account I only access once or twice; and even a new EBay identity just for the snipe. (This has the disadvantage of making my participation have a "zero" feedback rating at EBay for starters, but that's fine with me, I'm a once-a-month guy, I only have 7 feedbacks right now anyway).

 

Here are some services I've found listed here at FPN:

• Auction Sniper: http://www.auctionsniper.com/
• AuctionStealer: http://www.auctionstealer.com/
• BidNinja: http://www.bidninja.com/
• Bid-O-Matic (Biet-O-Matic): http://sourceforge.net/projects/bom/
• eSnipe: http://www.esnipe.com/
• EZSniper: http://www.ezsniper.com/
• JBidWatcher: http://www.jbidwatcher.com/
• JustSnipe: http://www.justsnipe.com/
• Snip: http://www.snip.pl/

If you guys all add your specific comments, I'll see what I can do to create a spreadsheet of all of these (and more) that we can keep pinned at the top of the Marketwatch Forum, if the moderators think that's a good idea. Edited March 7, 2008 by finalidid

[Deirdre]

I use JBidWatcher when I'm at my computer and AuctionStealer when I'm not going to be.

Edited March 7, 2008 by Deirdre

[lterry]

I used to use esnipe and discovered that eBay is updating their site to prevent use of these services. Now I just sit and watch - more fun, but a pain when away on business.

[finalidid]

How is EBay moving towards preventing sniping? Is there some change afoot?

[Jinnayah]

  lterry said:

I used to use esnipe and discovered that eBay is updating their site to prevent use of these services.

IMHO, unless they go the Yahoo!Japan route of automatically extending auction end times after last-second bids (which I could get behind), they'd be fools if they did. Sniping has been a part of eBay for years, and they're not going to stop that as long as they leave the hard end times. If they force manual sniping (with or without their new Real Time Countdown), they're going to cost themselves money. People who aren't able to manually snipe because they're at work or asleep won't bother to bid at all, knowing they can't compete with the manual snipers, and that'll result it lower ending bids in many cases.

 

Back to the original question. Because my computer is up and connected all the time, I usually use JBidWatcher. It does well for me, but because it has to snipe further in advance than other services, there is a chance for someone to manually up their bid over you. When I really want something, especially that looks like it will have a lot of competition, I use JustSnipe and it's done well by me.

[dobro]

  lterry said:

I used to use esnipe and discovered that eBay is updating their site to prevent use of these services.

 

Have you got a reference for this? I'd like to read more. I don't see how they could prevent automated sniping...the sniping service just logs in as me and bids at a specified time, right? If they delay the close of an auction for last-minute bids, that would make sense and be more like a live auction...is that what they're doing?

 

[hunter186]

I've had good luck with jbidwatcher. It's free and open source, which I like. I've used it on both Windows and Ubuntu Linux without any problems.

[hunter186]

I remember that jbidwatcher was broken once, after an ebay update. It was my understanding that ebay didn't intentionally block sniping software, as it isn't really any different than bidding manually at the last second. Ebay updates do break sniping software sometimes, however. Maybe it is intentional, but it seems that they would have to change their policies before officially blocking bid sniping.

Edited March 8, 2008 by hunter186

[finalidid]

OK, I've taken this thread's recommendation (so far) and gotten an account at JustSnipe. I've set it to snipe two different auctions upcoming (one for a pen!). I took the trouble to establish a brand-new EBay membership, to associate with my new JustSnipe membership (though at EBay I did use my real home address and credit card, which already exists in their database under other memberships ... wonder if that'll be a problem?).

 

So we'll see how it goes. First one ends tomorrow (Sunday) evening.

 

[finalidid]

OK well, it went fine, I won the item. But prowling around at JustSnipe I discovered this statement:

 

  Quote

What is the bid amount that JustSnipe place for me

 

Our server will place your maximum bid at the last seconds and let ebay proxy systems do the job.

 

That's silly. I don't really see a real advantage to that. I mean, it's nice that my personal maximum will now be placed at the last possible moment (8 seconds, in the free JustSnipe service), rather than hours beforehand. And yes, that does helpfully defeat nibblers. But what about all those auctions I've seen, where a winning bidder actually increments up his bid ten or fifteen times, all within the last minute? Isn't that some kind of sniping program?

 

I would really like it if my sniping program would actually proxy-bid for me. At one minute to go, before the end of the auction, the FinalSniper software logs in to EBay, finds out the item's current price, and bids one increment higher. It then monitors the winning bid, and at any time that someone else squeezes in a higher bid, it ups again. Thus, I'm not at the mercy of the EBay proxy bidding system, but instead am at the mercy of FinalSniper's.

 

This seems to me to have several advantages, but I can't really describe them. Am I all washed up here? Are there sniping services that would do it my way instead of the way JustSnipe has just done it. They only enter one bid for me, at 8 seconds to go. That's better than nothing; but it's not what I thought sniping would be. They're just firing one bullet. I want them to accurately fire a whole magazine of them, as many as necessary to win at a price as low as possible.

 

Make sense?

 

Anyway, I did win this item. Pretty ...

Edited March 10, 2008 by finalidid

[dobro]

Nice pipe!

 

I think eliminating the nibblers is reason enough to snipe. Also, depending on how active you are, your identity is hidden from other bidders, so no one knows if they're bidding against you or not. Of course, ebay has mostly done away with that as a problem with the new **** bidder IDs. One of the other things you can do is queue up a bid, but later delete it if for some reason you'd rather not bid - better item found, etc.

 

I see no reason to make multiple bids at the end of the auction. Sniping works.

[kiavonne]

Well, thanks for all the info, guys. You've just given me all the reasons I need to cancel my ebay account after 5 years. Never mind that I limited my purchases to an average 10/year. Seriously, if sniping is how it is done now, I don't need to be there. It's no longer an "auction" house. It's a machine-generated steal against those not so techno savvy, or those who want to honestly just want to get a good buy of an item someone else no longer needs. After my two remaining bids that are riding out there are "sniped," I'll go back to garage and estate sales. I need the exercise, anyway.

 

These "sniping" tools remind me all too much of the cheat programs that are now prevalent in online games. No one thinks they are wrong or bad to use, except the for a few of those that still think there should be some kind of honesty left among the masses and still play the game as it was meant and designed to be.

 

Sorry I have this opinion, but it IS just my opinion, after all. I've said too much.

 

Carry on.

 

 

[Roger W.]

Sniping is not "cheating". High bidder wins no matter when the bid is put in and Ebay has a deadline, pure and simple. I hardily agree that last minute bidding is the only way to stop people that nibble which I find very annoying. I use auctionsniper which has a small fee but, I'm sure the free ones probably work just as well.

 

Roger W.

[Deirdre]

Closed bid auctions are still auctions. The move to more sniping simply means that auctions are semi-open, not open (as originally intended).

[finalidid]

So there's no reason to have a multiple-bullet sniping gun? Just one bullet will do? Hmm ...

 

Other points:

 

I think Kiavonne has one good point and one bad one and (I think) missed one.

 

First, the bad one. No, winning by sniping is not "stealing" the auction. The high bidder always wins, regardless of whether it was done by a snipe program or by a manually entered bid. Someone who feels that an item would have been won by him, but who lost because a late snipe got in there, should have entered his REAL personal maximum when he entered his manual bid. The fact that he didn't, in the hopes of not having that max upped by competitors, makes HIM the cheater -- trying to "cheat" the auction by not entering a real maximum, but instead a fake maximum. The snipe program AND the eBay proxy-bid system both require that you enter a real maximum at some point. And the highest maximum always wins, snipe or not. It's simply NOT "cheating" to use the auction the way the auction was intended and win only if you have the highest bid, and lose if you don't. That's quite different from video-game cheats, which allow you to win even if you DON'T have the (metaphorical) highest bid.

 

Second, the good one. Yes, sniping on eBay does favor the more tech-savvy. I do agree that this is a mild detriment to the growing prevalence of sniping. For now, it doesn't mean that happy eBay members are all sniping while unhappy eBay members are none of them sniping, but it's going to come down to that at some point in the future. Kind of like performance-enhancing drugs in sport -- there are coming to be situations in which some sports simply "assume" you're going to use them (like in pose-off weight-lifting competitions) and therefore anyone who tries to compete WITHOUT the drugs is just not in the running. I think, however, it's kind of silly to complain about a computer-based service requiring technical knowledge. Signing up for eBay in the first place was harder for me than joining the sniping service which I used. JustSnipe WANTS my business, so they make it as user-friendly as possible. EBay doesn't need my business, they'll be just fine without me, so they're (marginally) more convolute.

 

Third, the missed one. Sniping has a further advantage. The winner (who would win either way) wins at a likely lower price. I got my pipe at one increment higher than the next highest bidder; but his highest bid was the one he posted in a long time ago, rather than the one he "nibbled" in against my maximum. If I'd manually non-sniping entered my maximum ($150) he would have nibbled to his maximum ($140?) and I would have gotten the pipe at one increment over his $140 -- at $142.50. Instead, I prevented his nibbling, the right person won, and I got a lower price, at $129, which is one increment higher than his initial maximum. I've saved him from his frenzy, won because I deserved to, and only reduced the advantages of ONE person -- the seller. Sellers must hate sniping. EBay gets the same fees, PayPal gets less fees, and the seller gets a lower final price. (Of course, without sniping I might not have bid on the item at all!)

 

So, Kiavonne, I think you're misled. If you want to manually enter several lower bids and then "at the last minute" manually enter a higher one, and think of that as more honorable, then I'll remind you, that you're already cheating, by not entering your personal maximum at the outset. And in that sense, Deirdre agreeing with her (calling it "less open") is only marginally accurate. Yes, only those people who have access to the internet will be able to continue to use eBay happily, if everyone goes to sniping all the time (which isn't happening anyway). But that constraint -- access to the internet -- is something that's necessary for eBay in the first place, so it's not constraining anything that doesn't already exist. Indeed, Deirdre, you're right: a new limitation is placed on eBay membership; but that limitation is open to an identical amount, to the limitation that was already placed on eBay membership: internet access.

Edited March 10, 2008 by finalidid

[CharlieB]

I still don't understand the advantage of sniping. If I see a pen that I want on eBay, I bid the top price I am willing to pay. If I bid $400, and others all stop bidding at $300, then I'll get the pen for $301, which is a great deal for me. If somebody snipes, they'll get the pen for $401. I shouldn't be sad, because $401 is more than I was willing to pay. If I had been willing to pay more than $400, I should have bid more than $400.

[Rapt]

The advantage is that there may be others willing to pay $400 but who want to get it for less so they bid it up slowly...

 

If you snipe them in the last seconds when its at $350 and win it then you paid $351 without giving them time to outbid you. So you get the item AND pay less than your maximum.

 

That's why the sniping. Otherwise they just outbid you.

 

It depends on your perspective on auctions.

 

Are you a person who goes in hoping they'll buy the item for X amount and that no one else thinks its worth that or are you going in thinking you want the best deal possible? From my point of view if you're buying at auction then you want the best deal possible otherwise you'd buy from a regular dealer.

 

Edited for typo.

Edited March 10, 2008 by Rapt

[Deirdre]

  finalidid said:

And in that sense, Deirdre agreeing with her (calling it "less open") is only marginally accurate.

What I meant was open in the sense of open vs. closed bidding.

 

An open bidding scenario is the classic motion picture auction.

 

A closed bidding scenario is sealed bids handed to the auctioneer, but not revealed in presence or quantity to other bidders.

 

With snipes, you've got a mix of open bidding (with semi-hidden limits) and closed bidding.

[dobro]

  Rapt said:

The advantage is that there may be others willing to pay $400 but who want to get it for less so they bid it up slowly...

 

Correct. If everyone put in their maximum bid one time, whenever that was, there would be no need for sniping, in fact, it would be advantageous to bid as early as possible, as in a tie, the early bidder wins.

 

Sniping is a means to buy at as low a price as possible, not necessarily to win the auction.

 

We (an ebay seller I work for) use sniping all the time when buying items, so we really can't complain as sellers when it is used.

:-)

 

 

[Deirdre]

  CharlieB said:

I still don't understand the advantage of sniping.

The advantage is the same as in poker of having your cards face up (bidding early) vs. down (sniping): it's all about when information is available to others.