Their answer, by the way, is that 4-18% of people are less likely to return to the platform as a result of irritation over sniping. eBay's mechanism for automa

Their answer, by the way, is that 4-18% of people are less likely to return to the platform as a result of irritation over sniping. eBay's mechanism for automatically increasing your bid to your reserve as necessary should alleviate this. For me, it does ... I put in my max bid and just let it go (years ago, I sniped manually, when I had ntp and a fast connection and not everybody else did; that was good). But I find that for people bidding on my auctions, some don't understand the max bid idea (so are very good sniping targets) and others appear to understand it but still think they're going to get sniped anyway. I don't know how this could be but I've had a couple confusing conversations over it with people who offer me lots of money to end auctions early (and who don't otherwise seem like scammers). So even though eBay has a way to beat this, regular people don't find it usable enough, basically. The TradeMe mechanism another commenter mentioned sounds smart.