5 ms·

I never understood why eBay set things up to enable sniping. Many years ago, there was an auction site called uBid. They had the sane rule: Bidding is open as

• pishpash 9mo ago
  There is no need for that. They only need to implement a closing auction like stock markets. But eBay hasn't done anything since the 1990's except raise fees.
  • iLoveOncall 9mo ago
    > But eBay hasn't done anything since the 1990's except raise fees. Meanwhile it's now 100% free to sell on eBay for non-professional sellers. https://www.ebay.co.uk/help/selling/fees-credits-invoices/fees-private-sellers-activated-managed-payments?id=4822 https://www.ebay.co.uk/help/selling/fees-credits-invoices/fe...
    • jsheard 9mo ago
      They're playing stupid semantic games in order to claim there's no selling fees while still having selling fees. The fees were ostensibly shifted onto the buyer, except they're bundled into the sale price and cut from what the seller receives, so in effect nothing actually changed. Before: Buyer pays £100, seller receives £100, seller later charged £5 fee, ends up with £95. After: Buyer pays £100, eBay pockets £5 "buyer protection fee", seller receives £95 with "no fees".
      • iLoveOncall 9mo ago
        Except you can price higher to include that cut, and the buyer protection fee is a lower percentage than the sales one was (between 7% and 2% VS I think 11%).
    • pwg 9mo ago
      > it's now 100% free to sell Nice: > You won't pay final value fees or regulatory operating fees Of course, they will likely find some other way to extract their fees. It would be nice, however, if the final value fee went away for US non-professional sellers. There does seem to be no indication (at least on the page you linked) of how they define "private seller", which also opens up the possibility of them defining it so narrowly that, say, only five UK residents ever qualify.
    • kotaKat 9mo ago
      Only in the UK, and only on "private sellers". eBay is losing a lot of marketshare in the UK so they've taken drastic measures to try to get people listing again.
      • wooger 9mo ago
        Makes sense. In the UK, their fees plus the encouraged (used to be mandatory as an option) Paypal payment option steals a very significant chunk of the purchase price from sellers. In the last 5 years I've won multiple auctions for not-really-worth-shipping things like bikes, paid via Paypal, then had the buyers contact me to say the fees are too high, cancel the auction and deal separately in cash. For anything that you're picking up in person anyway, very little reason to use ebay vs. FB marketplace.
  • mmsc 9mo ago
    Nothing? Don't forget when their security team sent pigs heads to people and terrorized them:)
    • robin_reala 9mo ago
      I think I missed this…
      • mmsc 9mo ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal
        • robin_reala 9mo ago
          Wow! That was a read that kept on escalating.
• pwg 9mo ago
  Another eBay precursor auction side, onsale.com, had the same setup. The auction ended at X date/time or five or ten minutes (I forget which) after the last bid was made.
• gpt5 9mo ago
  Guessing here - but they are probably relying on game theory / auction theory. They have a built in "sniping bot" - by allowing you to type your highest price, and it will auto-bid for you until that price. The fear of being sniped encourages you to bid your maximum value, and not just wait and see if you can sneak in a lower bid. This is what all auction sites want.
  • postalrat 9mo ago
    Except nobody uses it that way. Auctions are rare themselves. Sellers dont like it, buyers dont like it yet ebay won't change it.
    • cjbgkagh 9mo ago
      People will pay a premium to win, not everyone but enough to make it worth it.
  • BeetleB 9mo ago
    > They have a built in "sniping bot" - by allowing you to type your highest price, and it will auto-bid for you until that price. With ubid, you also had the feature of letting it bid to your highest price. Yet they still extended the auction if someone outbid your highest price.
    • kylecordes 9mo ago
      That seems like a good bit of psychology as it accommodates both people with the mental fortitude to type in their genuine max bid in the first place, and also people who don't really know what they're willing to bid until they see somebody else bid higher.
• mkl 9mo ago
  This how Trade Me (NZ auction site) works: any bid in the last 2 minutes delays the close time to 2 minutes after the bid. That can happen repeatedly, and I've seen it go on for over 20 minutes on highly contended auctions. It works well.
  • qwertytyyuu 9mo ago
    For the auction house that is
    • b800h 9mo ago
      For the seller.
      • mkl 9mo ago
        For everyone. Sellers and auction house get a good price, and buyers don't get sniped.
  • grogenaut 9mo ago
    There are 9 time zones in the US and depending on what your buying in the eu, jp, etc, I'm not going to be up to deal with the end of an auction, either too early too late or you know I have a real efing job and i'm doing something. Having ends of auction require you to be around means you lock out large parts of the market.
    • fennecfoxy 9mo ago
      ...that's what auctions are...being around to bid...
      • direwolf20 9mo ago
        Except for sealed bid auctions. EBay doesn't do sealed bid auctions, and that's fine.
    • mcherm 9mo ago
• giobox 9mo ago
  This is how the popular car auction site bringatrailer.com bidding process works for cars sold on their site too, a quirk of which is that it makes watching the end of the auctions live online kinda fun, especially given the discussions that break out in comment section on each car up for sale while folks nervously watch the current candidate for the final bid cool down. Much like your example, in the two minutes before the end of the auction, every new bid placed extends the auction clock by another two minutes, the winner hasn't won the auction until two minutes have passed with no further counter bids. > https://bringatrailer.com/how-bat-works/ https://bringatrailer.com/how-bat-works/
  • kylecordes 9mo ago
    Auction site design where most every transaction is a very material amount of money for buyer and seller probably have different trade-offs from something like eBay where most items are rounding errors compared to the income or wealth of the participants. For example, think about "sniping" from the seller side. Sellers are rightly concerned about any wrinkle of the bidding process that might leave money on the table. Automatically extending the time so that every potential buyer has time to "answer" a new bid soothes the concern that buyers were willing to pay higher, but they didn't have the technological prowess to post their bid in the last 0.3 seconds.
• b800h 9mo ago
  Completely agree with this. It's very odd that the eBay algorithm has a hard stop, as it directly discourages the price from rising when the bidding is hottest, and is absolutely susceptible to sniping.
• Shank 9mo ago
  This is how Yahoo! Japan Auctions works. If an auction receives a bid in the last few minutes, it is automatically extended. It works quite well!
• cge 9mo ago
  In my experience, most purely online auctions, other than eBay, do work that way. Numerous auction houses, for example, including essentially all the major ones, have their auctions online now: when they are hybrid, that involves online live bidding where an online bid will cause the auctioneer in the room to keep the lot open for more bids; when they are "timed" or "online only", times are extended in some way on bids near the deadline. It does, in fact, work much better. There is still an advantage to bidding very late: there is no disadvantage, and it lowers bids in cases of irrational or imperfect opposing bidders. But it limits that process to something that can be done by hand. eBay really seems to be the only auctioneer using the snipable process it uses.
  • cornholio 9mo ago
    An alternative to ever extending the deadline is a Dutch auction model, where a bid consists of the maximum price you are willing to pay. It's a bit like integrating the snipping bot in eBay and allowing everyone to use it on fair terms. For example, suppose the current price is $1 and the current winner is someone who bid $2 as their maximum bid ceiling. If I bid a $3 maximum, then I become the winner at a price of $2. In this model, there is no need for snipping and those who honestly declare their maximum ceiling from the start are in no disadvantage compared to those who frequently update their bid, nor do they overpay.
    • mpeg 9mo ago
      Unless I’m missing something this is exactly how eBay works. You set a max bid and then it auto bids up to that amount so you can’t get sniped unless they bid higher than your max. Not that this is perfect either, often it means you can push other people’s bids up to their max even though you have no intention of buying the item. I’ve seen it as a seller and felt bad for the buyers
      • technothrasher 9mo ago
        Yes, almost all online auction sites (or even offline absentee bidding) work this way. You set your maximum price and the auction house bids for you. However, in any case, bidding early gives other bidders information on how much you're willing to bid and allows them to nibble their way up to your max. So bidding late is always advantageous, even when you're setting a max bid. I've never quite understood why people get so upset about sniping on eBay. Anybody can snipe. That's just the best play. Any time I want to bid on something on eBay, I just set my max bid on the sniping tool instead of on eBay, and then forget about it.
• RobotToaster 9mo ago
  That's how whatnot does it as well (what eBay badly copied as eBay live)
• mpeg 9mo ago
  AFAIK eBay does do this but I’m not sure if it’s only certain categories or it’s configurable by seller. I’ve definitely seen it happen
• dspillett 9mo ago
  > I never understood why eBay set things up to enable sniping. I've seen studies on auction method that suggest the difference in the final price (between explicit end time and the more traditional extend-until-bidding-stops method) is negligible for online auctions except in a few special cases. This is a marked difference from the expectation that, like a real-world in-person auction, the extending deadline might encourage further spur-of-the-moment bidding. Whether it makes much difference to the final price or not is immaterial though if the buyers believe that it does. This is one of the (several) reasons why eBay won out against similar competition in the early days: buyers felt they were getting a better deal by being able to snipe so favoured eBay with more of their attention and this brought more sellers to the platform (which attracted more buyers, and so on round the loop). It is telling that to deal with the extra load imposed on the system by external bots refreshing pages and putting in automated bids, instead of switching to an extending auction model they implemented what is almost a built-in sniping feature. Auction sites have to be very careful (or just very lucky) in their messaging, to convince both sellers and buyers that they are getting a good deal - any major change to how eBay works could upset the balance that they currently have in that regard and start a flood in the other direction (the more people leave, the more other people will think about leaving) to the building toward critical mass that was how they won out in those early days.
  • DangitBobby 9mo ago
    > being able to snipe so favoured eBay with more of their attention and this brought more sellers to the platform Did they measure the impact of people who stopped using the platform due to their bids being sniped?
    • dspillett 9mo ago
      Unsure (those reports I read were some time ago). Though that may be another reason why the built-in snipe-like tool was added, so appease those users as well as to decrease the load imposed by external tools.
    • freedomben 9mo ago
      I would bet that they have. Personally I stopped using eBay because of sniping. I'm a particularly devastating case for them, because had the system not felt rigged to me then I likely would have continued on the site making many purchases. However it immediately made me lose confidence in the system and bail.
• pessimizer 9mo ago
  > Bidding is open as long as there have been bids in the past 5 minutes. You also have to proportionally raise the bid increment, or you'll have people bidding $1 up at the end of every 5 minute period in order to exhaust and frustrate the person they're bidding against. Their opponent's only choices are 1) to mirror the $1 raises, which could go on for ages (then sleep and automation become issues), or 2) to make a big jump hoping that they jump past their opponents limit. In the case of 2) the dollar bidder's limit could be +$10, and there's no rational way for their opponent to choose the amount for a big jump other than jumping to their limit. Meaning that they just wipe away all of their potential bargain and get it for their valuation. Leaves a sour taste; feels like they're bidding against themselves. As somebody who auctions things, I use a required greater than "≈10%" of the current bid amount bid increment, and the auction doesn't end on an item until there hasn't been a bid for 10 minutes. Works great. "≈10%" means to just drop the last digit of the current bid to know the minimum next bid. Then I can set the auction to end an hour before I really want it to end; if it hasn't ended by then it's because I mispriced something and the right people found it. You capture all the value you can, and it runs completely unattended. You just need a way to timestamp bids and broadcast that timestamp e.g. a forum post.
• dlcarrier 9mo ago
  Pretty much every auction platform I've seen, except eBay, extends listings by a few minutes every time a bid is received.
• IOT_Apprentice 9mo ago
  Wow. I remember Ubid, and I bought several things from it. It would become problematic when folks would bid up things far beyond the starting price.
• reverendjames 9mo ago
  Japanese auction sites work this way too.