Ebay Morality

blansky · Sep 20, 2005

Does anybody know if you proxy bid to a certain level and two proxy's are automatically outbidding each other if a sniper can jump in with, say seconds to go and bump a proxy but run the others out of time.

In other words can a sniper jump in at the last second and run out the time for a proxy bid to go to it's top level.

Michael

John Bartley · Sep 20, 2005

blansky said:
Does anybody know if you proxy bid to a certain level and two proxy's are automatically outbidding each other if a sniper can jump in with, say seconds to go and bump a proxy but run the others out of time.

In other words can a sniper jump in at the last second and run out the time for a proxy bid to go to it's top level.

Michael

No. The bids are all based on maximum amount and earliest time bid. All that happens at the end is that the highest bid wins and if two bids are the same amount, then the earliest one placed is the winner. Proxy only means that you can bid your maximum, only the amount "needed" to win is shown to the other bidders and only the amount needed to win is taken by eBay as the high bid.

cheers

Bob F. · Sep 20, 2005

That would depend on how badly the ebay software is written... I would expect that once all bids are in and the time is up, ebay's back-end should then look at all bids and the times they were set in its database, ignoring all bids after the close and apply the bidding rules to decide who won and at what price. I very much doubt that it would be time critical so that a last millisecond bid would prevent a previous maximum bid from being recognized - the proxy bid is already in the database and there is no action that needs to be taken that might take up any processing time.

Of course, if the back-end had been written by Microsoft, it probably would select the lowest bid.... and then crash....

Cheers, Bob.

roteague · Sep 20, 2005

Bob F. said:
Of course, if the back-end had been written by Microsoft, it probably would select the lowest bid.... and then crash....

Actually not, Microsoft servers are quite robust, as are Microsoft database servers.

smieglitz · Sep 20, 2005

I often snipe myself. Here's how I work it:

If I see an item I have a moderate interest in, say a Petzval lens in good shape, I'll make an initial bid lower than what I am willing to pay for an item, but high enough that it will discourage many bidders who think they might walk away with the item for almost nothing. I believe this part of the strategy results in fewer people bidding overall... less competition. Having a bid placed also brings the item to my attention in the "Items I'm Bidding On" section of my summary page. (While I watch some of these too, a lot of the watched items are just to see what the items eventually go for and there are a bunch that I really have no intention on bidding for. Example: I might watch an item similar to one I already own to determine its current value.)

If I really want the item, I'll snipe myself in the last few seconds. Since I can't increase my own final bid amount unless someone else snipes too, I have nothing to lose by doing so. So with about 6 seconds to go I place my real highest bid and let Jim Galli walk away with the item.

Joe

JHannon · Sep 20, 2005

smieglitz said:
So with about 6 seconds to go I place my real highest bid and let Jim Galli walk away with the item.

Joe

Bob F. · Sep 20, 2005

roteague said:
Actually not, Microsoft servers are quite robust, as are Microsoft database servers.

<--- inserted to show I was joking....

roteague · Sep 20, 2005

Bob F. said:
<--- inserted to show I was joking....

Opps, sorry Bob. I jumped too quickly. (shame on me)

Bob F. · Sep 20, 2005

roteague said:
Opps, sorry Bob. I jumped too quickly. (shame on me)

I must confess that I make about 10 - 15% of my income by installing and configuring Windows servers, and in a previous life I've even programmed SQLServer databases. So in the real world, I agree: they are as stable as any other small server (yes folks, that includes *nix servers (that should get someone going !) and have been since Win2k (NT was a *bit* dodgy 'though ...).

Cheers, Bob.

moose10101 · Sep 20, 2005

Dan Fromm said:
If you're outbid and would have paid more than you bid, shame on you for concealing your true preferences. You lied to yourself and were caught.

And you're also the one who's hosed the seller by not revealing what you were actually willing to pay, since the final price is determined by what the 2nd place bidder offered.

David A. Goldfarb · Sep 20, 2005

smieglitz said:
So with about 6 seconds to go I place my real highest bid and let Jim Galli walk away with the item.

Joe

Try bidding on this one, and see if Jim outbids you--

Dead Link Removed

You mention this kind of thing on the internet, of course, and then all of a sudden everyone wants one, and the price skyrockets.

Dan Fromm · Sep 20, 2005

seadrive wrote "If the amount I'm willing to pay is substantially more than the current price, going into the last few minutes, I will almost always win, because the auto-sniping programs are busy upping their bid by a dollar here and a dollar there."

Huh? The sniping program I use simulates me, i.e., it puts in a bid at my maximum very shortly before the auction ends. And then the eBay bidding proxy engine takes over.

I've always read a series of bids with different time/date stamps from the same bidder as coming from an idiot who doesn't understand what the proxy bidder does, not from a sniping engine. Or, perhaps, from an idiot who lets others' willingness to pay affect his own.

Dan Fromm · Sep 20, 2005

Smieglitz, if Galli beats you consistently then the most you'll pay is consistently very, very low. Jim usually buys for resale and is very cold-blooded about bidding. He needs his margins, can't afford to overpay.

srs5694 · Sep 20, 2005

That's quite a hornet's nest you've stirred up, Flotsam!

Personally, I snipe. I don't believe it's in any way wrong, and I'm unapologetic about it. If all bidders treated eBay auctions the way eBay says they should work, sniping wouldn't make any difference. The description of eBay's auction system is that it's a proxy bid system. You place a maximum bid, and eBay automatically increases your bid as other bids arrive, up to the maximum of the second-highest bidder plus an increment or to your high bid, whichever is lower. (Note this means that the second-highest bidder sets the price, and will seem to have been outbid by a small amount. This is deceptive, though; the high bidder could have placed a much higher maximum bid and paid much less than this value.) If everybody simply bid the value they thought the item was worth and didn't increase their bids (that is, if they behaved in a way economists would call "rational"), sniping would make no difference.

Sniping does make a difference, though, for two main reasons:

Some people don't seem to understand the concept of the proxy bid system and keep entering higher and higher bids, all of which are lower than their maximums. Snipers have an advantage over such people because these "incremental bidders" don't understand the system. IMHO, the solution to this problem isn't to rant against or ban sniping but to educate people about how the bidding system works.
Some people tend to get caught up in the competitiveness of eBay and increase their bids past what the item's true value is -- even higher than its subjective true value to the bidder. IMHO, sniping is the solution to this problem, at least as eBay is currently structured.

Of course, these two issues aren't always easy to separate; a single bidder can slide from the first category into the second as an auction progresses.

I have yet to see an anti-sniping argument that I find even remotely convincing. Most seem to be either very vague foot-stomping rants ("it's just wrong, that's all!") or based on a misunderstanding of how how eBay works (a failure to comprehend eBay's proxy bidding system, typically).

In any event, I highly recommend this page, and particularly that page's Common Snipe Myths subpage. There's a lot of misinformation that's been presented in this very thread, although the ones I've noticed have all been corrected by subsequent posters, so I won't revisit them.

Incidentally, I noticed one or two comments in this thread about an unwillingness to pay for sniping software. Some sniping software is free. Check out jBidwatcher, for instance. It's a free Java-based sniping program, so it'll run on Windows, MacOS, or Linux/Unix. It's a bit of a memory hog for what it does, though.

Bob F. · Sep 20, 2005

srs5694 said:
Some sniping software is free. Check out jBidwatcher, for instance. It's a free Java-based sniping program, so it'll run on Windows, MacOS, or Linux/Unix. It's a bit of a memory hog for what it does, though.

Thanks for reminding me... I meant to say that I use the freeware Bid-O-Matic (https://sourceforge.net/projects/bom) which is German but it's fairly easy to figure out if you do not read German (the program can run in English - it's the instructions that are in German....). Written in VB, so Windows 32 only.

Cheers, Bob.

jd callow · Sep 20, 2005

David A. Goldfarb said:
Try bidding on this one, and see if Jim outbids you--

Dead Link Removed

You mention this kind of thing on the internet, of course, and then all of a sudden everyone wants one, and the price skyrockets.

If he doesn't I might. As a kid we would spend 2 weeks in summer at my grandfather's house in Milan (pronounced my' lan) MI. Down Ida, my grandfather's street, was Butler's (pronounced butt' lickers by us urbane adolescents). There, stored in an old time cooler, we would find 6 oz cokes; they sold for about dime.

Damn, I have gotten old.

jimgalli · Sep 20, 2005

This is an entertaining thread. Of course I snipe! Otherwise I'm just giving you 2 valuable pieces of free information for YOUR strategy. I'm letting you know I'm hovering, and exactly what I'm willing to pay. Why would I do that if I don't have to. Yes I use snipe engines too. I used to have 2 windows open and the clock synchronized for the final pounce. Don't even have to bother with that anymore. Just put in what I'm willing to pay and wait for the auction to be over. If it makes you feel any better I only win about 1 in 7 or more. Seems there's other snipers out there that want a lot of stuff worse than I do. What has changed is the panic feeling for sellers like me who have decent stuff with no reserve and a $9 starting bid that sits all week with $14.55 bid and it's worth $225. You've got to have some faith that the same snipers are going to jump on it at the end. I've gotten disgusted and pulled the plug more than once.

Hey, cool coke bottle. I could knock the bottom out of that and put it in a shutter and tell everybody it is sharp as hell.

bobfowler · Sep 20, 2005

The snipers used to piss me off, but now I just chalk it the lost bids to someone else paying too much.

What does piss me off are sellers who load their listings with hidden text so that their items come up on just about every keyword search. Take a look at this auction.

My search criteria was "Bronica" and I checked the "Search title and description" box. Do you "see" Bronica anywhere in the listing? Of course you don't. What jerkweed does (in all of his listings) is have a lot of very small text that is the same color as the background with a boatload of keywords between what appears to be paragraphs. Of course, he "formats" those keywords to look like legitimate text in the listing, but it's a bullshit way of being certain his cheap crap clogs up every search.

Now I'm not just picking on this jerk, there are plenty others who do much the same thing. They piss me off as well......

moose10101 · Sep 20, 2005

seadrive said:
If the amount I'm willing to pay is substantially more than the current price, going into the last few minutes, I will almost always win, because the auto-sniping programs are busy upping their bid by a dollar here and a dollar there. Given the nature of the HTTP request/response system, they eventually run out of time.

Sniping software places a single proxy bid at the user's specified maximum amount. There's no "dollar here and a dollar there", and they don't run out of time. If you win, it's because you bid more, and that's exactly how it should be.

Bob F. · Sep 20, 2005

bobfowler said:
<snip> ... Now I'm not just picking on this jerk, there are plenty others who do much the same thing. They piss me off as well......

That' s a breach of ebay rules. Report him and get his wrist slapped. If he keeps it up he'll get booted (eventually). Annoys me too - I always report them (and people who spam dozens of categories with off-topic auctions). Trouble is, by the time ebay pulls their finger out, the auction has usually finished....

Cheers, Bob.

jd callow · Sep 20, 2005

Does Ebay really enforce any of their rules?

bobfowler · Sep 20, 2005

mrcallow said:
Does Ebay really enforce any of their rules?

Unless it involves fraud, I doubt it...

Bob F. · Sep 20, 2005

mrcallow said:
Does Ebay really enforce any of their rules?

They are certainly very variable in my own experience. Often the main problem is that they are so slow to react: whatever the offence was, it is too late by the time they actually get around to admitting there is a problem and doing something about it - the auction has completed. I have seen them pull a series of spams within 12 hours after my complaint - other times they have let them run. I suspect it depends largely on who is in charge and how busy they are on other things...

David A. Goldfarb · Sep 20, 2005

jimgalli said:
Hey, cool coke bottle. I could knock the bottom out of that and put it in a shutter and tell everybody it is sharp as hell.

Nah, tell 'em it's got the swirly bokeh.

Ever tried a Duto filter? I got one in a 70mm Linhof mount with some other Linhof filters (from a seller who didn't realize that one of the filters that they had in the lot was an expensive Linhof polarizer mislabeled as an ND filter, even though they should have known better). It looks remarkably like the bottom of a Coke bottle.

smieglitz · Sep 20, 2005

David A. Goldfarb said:
Try bidding on this one, and see if Jim outbids you--

Dead Link Removed

You mention this kind of thing on the internet, of course, and then all of a sudden everyone wants one, and the price skyrockets.

You think it has the bokeh quality Jim is usually after?

Joe

Ebay Morality

blansky

John Bartley

Bob F.

roteague

smieglitz

JHannon

Bob F.

roteague

Bob F.

moose10101

David A. Goldfarb

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Dan Fromm

Dan Fromm

srs5694

Bob F.

jd callow

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jimgalli

bobfowler

moose10101

Bob F.

jd callow

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bobfowler

Bob F.

David A. Goldfarb

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smieglitz

Ebay Morality

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