8 ms·

Establishing the price ceiling is difficult, though. You might arbitrarily set it as $23, but be sniped at $23.30. The sniper bot only needs to bid that small

Establishing the price ceiling is difficult, though. You might arbitrarily set it as $23, but be sniped at $23.30. The sniper bot only needs to bid that small increment over your arbitrary ceiling. Can you really say that $23 was your hard limit, or would you have paid $23.40? Unless you're buying something also available at retail, nobody can be that accurate in foresight. Sniping removes the 'contemplation window' to reconsider your bid.

ryandrake 9mo ago
Then just put your actual hard limit in as your bid, and sleep soundly, knowing that if someone pays $0.01 more, it's OK because you wouldn't have wanted to pay that anyway. I've never really been bothered by "sniping" in eBay. I always bid my absolute 100% maximum, and if someone bids more than me, then they can have it.
- bena 9mo ago
  It gets into the nature of "Which grain of sand makes it a pile?" Knowing people bid snipe by bidding one cent over whole dollars, would you consistently bid two cents over if it meant you would win more of your auctions? One cent is negligible. If you asked me if I would have paid $10.01 instead of $10.00, I'd probably say "Sure". $10.02? $10.03? Like, where does the line get drawn? And then you come at it from the other way. Let's say I'd pay $10, but not $11. But what about $10.50? $10.25? Or we can go down by pennies again. I agree, put in your limit and walk away. If you get overbid, even by a cent, don't sweat it. That's the game. But I can see why people get frustrated when they lose an auction by one cent.
  - dmurray 9mo ago
    Maybe eBay should publish the price the winning bidder actually bid. This would let people stop thinking "I lost by one cent" in that situation. It also has a marketing benefit: look at all these people who got great bargains relative to what they would have paid. And it's not an unreasonable amount of transparency: in second price auctions e.g. for stamps or electricity, it's normal to publish the details of all the bids. Of course eBay has already thought about this more deeply than me and perhaps trialled it and decided they didn't like it. Maybe it's off-putting to sellers to see they lost something for $10 to a buyer who would have paid $30?
    - bena 9mo ago
      The only way to win by a cent is to put your bid at that. If the current price is $5 and your max bid is $30 and I put a max bid of $100, it will make the current price $31 - $35, whatever the increment is. To get ebay to accept a bid of one cent over, you have to explicitly set that. Let's say, I'd actually pay $30 as well. $30.01 isn't materially different. So if I put in $30.01, my bid becomes higher than yours.
- nutjob2 9mo ago
  If you enter your maximum bid in ebay you're revealing it. With sniping no one can discover your maximum bid. The 'nibblers' will invariably show up and bid small amounts until they exceed your maximum bid, while not revealing theirs.
  - jsmith99 9mo ago
    It's a second price auction. Who cares what their limit is. If it's more than the value of the item to you then they will win. Otherwise you will win.
    - ryandrake 9mo ago
      Exactly. I could put $100,000 as my max bid, but if second place only bids $10, then all they know is I bid $11 (or whatever the increment is). eBay doesn't tell anyone my max is $100K.
      - krackers 9mo ago
        I think the reasoning is that people are irrational, and people don't actually have "hard limits' so others will bid in increments to exceed it. So in aggregate you will end up hitting your max more often because of others' irrationality than if it was a sealed auction and you don't give them that chance.
        vidarh 9mo ago
        People also will often have a "hard at the time" limit that turns out to be very soft when they realise other people also wants the same thing. A bidding war can make the perceived value of an item increase.
        nutjob2 9mo ago
        This is my point. If you look at the actual behavior and read people's comments in forums you'll see that almost no one sticks to their "hard limit". Including me! People's competitive behavior, or "you're not taking this from me," or "I've definitely got this item and have made plans" or any number of other emotional behaviors take over. People's railing against sniping also demonstrates this.
- hattmall 9mo ago
  But I want to get the item as cheaply as possible, not pay as close to my maximum without going over.
  - no-name-here 9mo ago
    That's exactly what automatic bidding does - it only outbids enough to beat the competing bid (up to your max) without paying any more than is needed. https://www.ebay.com/help/buying/bidding/automatic-bidding?id=4014 https://www.ebay.com/help/buying/bidding/automatic-bidding?i... (Manual bids have bid increments as well. Although others have pointed out that advance bidding might cause others to bid more than they would if they thought no one else wants the item. )
    - throwaway_20357 9mo ago
      Yes, what I think happens is the following: User A's price ceiling is $10, User B's $12. When both reveal their max price early, the item will go to $10.50 ($0.50 increment over A's max price). User A then has plenty of time to notice the item being valued at $10.50 by someone. In many cases users then adjust the value they assign to the item and increase their bid. The result: User B has to pay more than $10.50 they would have paid when sniping the item seconds before auction expiration.
- TeMPOraL 9mo ago
  Not everyone is in auctions for the game, some people want to actually get the item. Though I imagine there's less and less of them, as most figured out long ago that auctions are a stupid waste of time. In fact, I'm somewhat angry at sellers setting up auctions if there's no other way to acquire a specific item. Why they won't put a minimum price they're happy to part with some items for, instead of wasting time of a lot of people by withholding target price and pretending they're earning premium through work?
- cm2187 9mo ago
  But if that someone isn't rational it is better to not give him the time to react to your highest bid. Also some sellers seem to use some fake accounts to bid high on their own item, revealing your max bid, then cancel their bid, then bid right under your max bid to maximise their sell price. Happened to me twice, and now no longer setting my max bid in advance since.
  - neilfrndes 9mo ago
    I thought eBay doesn't allow you to cancel a bid you placed.
    - cm2187 9mo ago
      It does. You can argue you bid a wrong amount by mistake. It's necessary because mistakes do happen, and it even happened to me to retract a mistake once (was bidding on two items simultaneously in two tabs and mixed them up). But it gets abused.
  - ycombinatrix 9mo ago
    What were you buying?
    - cm2187 9mo ago
      Mostly electronics, SSDs, motherboards, etc.
- mort96 9mo ago
  I don't understand this line of reasoning. I don't do auctions, but if I did, it would be because I want that item. When I want something, I never have an absolute hard price ceiling; if I'm willing to pay $10000, I'm willing to pay $10000.01. I can't imagine anyone who would be happy to pay $X for an item but not $X + $0.01. Like, if I'm at a store and an item costs $500, and I bring it to the checkout and the cashier says "oh sorry that was mislabeled, it's $500.01 not $500", there is no world in which I go "okay never mind then, $500 was my max". There does not exist a situation where I've decided I want something at price $X, but would not buy it at price $X + $0.01, because $0.01 is absolutely negligible. So where does this fantasy of an absolute max price come from?
  - direwolf20 9mo ago
    The field of Economics
  - thornewolf 9mo ago
    it's because this argument of "what is $0.01 more?" can be extended forever, implying you are willing to pay an infinite amount of money for anything. since we know this is silly, we try to understand what our "real" maximum is. this is difficult to do for exactly the reasons you mention in your comment! surely $0.01 is negligible! there is a tension here. and so, absolute max price is not a fantasy - the world would be absurd if it were - but instead its a real and difficult to construct value
    - mort96 9mo ago
      It can be extended forever in theory, and sure, that is an interesting philosophical discussion, but it isn't in practice. We're discussing sniping. That means you make the choice once: do I send in a last-second bid that's $.01 more than my "max price", or do I not?
      - elzbardico 9mo ago
        If your time has no value for you, sure, keep glued to your machine sending countless counterbids $0.01 higher than the latest bid.

ryandrake 9mo ago

Then just put your actual hard limit in as your bid, and sleep soundly, knowing that if someone pays $0.01 more, it's OK because you wouldn't have wanted to pay that anyway. I've never really been bothered by "sniping" in eBay. I always bid my absolute 100% maximum, and if someone bids more than me, then they can have it.

bena 9mo ago
It gets into the nature of "Which grain of sand makes it a pile?" Knowing people bid snipe by bidding one cent over whole dollars, would you consistently bid two cents over if it meant you would win more of your auctions? One cent is negligible. If you asked me if I would have paid $10.01 instead of $10.00, I'd probably say "Sure". $10.02? $10.03? Like, where does the line get drawn? And then you come at it from the other way. Let's say I'd pay $10, but not $11. But what about $10.50? $10.25? Or we can go down by pennies again. I agree, put in your limit and walk away. If you get overbid, even by a cent, don't sweat it. That's the game. But I can see why people get frustrated when they lose an auction by one cent.
- dmurray 9mo ago
  Maybe eBay should publish the price the winning bidder actually bid. This would let people stop thinking "I lost by one cent" in that situation. It also has a marketing benefit: look at all these people who got great bargains relative to what they would have paid. And it's not an unreasonable amount of transparency: in second price auctions e.g. for stamps or electricity, it's normal to publish the details of all the bids. Of course eBay has already thought about this more deeply than me and perhaps trialled it and decided they didn't like it. Maybe it's off-putting to sellers to see they lost something for $10 to a buyer who would have paid $30?
  - bena 9mo ago
    The only way to win by a cent is to put your bid at that. If the current price is $5 and your max bid is $30 and I put a max bid of $100, it will make the current price $31 - $35, whatever the increment is. To get ebay to accept a bid of one cent over, you have to explicitly set that. Let's say, I'd actually pay $30 as well. $30.01 isn't materially different. So if I put in $30.01, my bid becomes higher than yours.
nutjob2 9mo ago
If you enter your maximum bid in ebay you're revealing it. With sniping no one can discover your maximum bid. The 'nibblers' will invariably show up and bid small amounts until they exceed your maximum bid, while not revealing theirs.
- jsmith99 9mo ago
  It's a second price auction. Who cares what their limit is. If it's more than the value of the item to you then they will win. Otherwise you will win.
  - ryandrake 9mo ago
    Exactly. I could put $100,000 as my max bid, but if second place only bids $10, then all they know is I bid $11 (or whatever the increment is). eBay doesn't tell anyone my max is $100K.
    - krackers 9mo ago
      I think the reasoning is that people are irrational, and people don't actually have "hard limits' so others will bid in increments to exceed it. So in aggregate you will end up hitting your max more often because of others' irrationality than if it was a sealed auction and you don't give them that chance.
      - vidarh 9mo ago
        People also will often have a "hard at the time" limit that turns out to be very soft when they realise other people also wants the same thing. A bidding war can make the perceived value of an item increase.
      - nutjob2 9mo ago
        This is my point. If you look at the actual behavior and read people's comments in forums you'll see that almost no one sticks to their "hard limit". Including me! People's competitive behavior, or "you're not taking this from me," or "I've definitely got this item and have made plans" or any number of other emotional behaviors take over. People's railing against sniping also demonstrates this.
hattmall 9mo ago
But I want to get the item as cheaply as possible, not pay as close to my maximum without going over.
- no-name-here 9mo ago
  That's exactly what automatic bidding does - it only outbids enough to beat the competing bid (up to your max) without paying any more than is needed. https://www.ebay.com/help/buying/bidding/automatic-bidding?id=4014 https://www.ebay.com/help/buying/bidding/automatic-bidding?i... (Manual bids have bid increments as well. Although others have pointed out that advance bidding might cause others to bid more than they would if they thought no one else wants the item. )
  - throwaway_20357 9mo ago
    Yes, what I think happens is the following: User A's price ceiling is $10, User B's $12. When both reveal their max price early, the item will go to $10.50 ($0.50 increment over A's max price). User A then has plenty of time to notice the item being valued at $10.50 by someone. In many cases users then adjust the value they assign to the item and increase their bid. The result: User B has to pay more than $10.50 they would have paid when sniping the item seconds before auction expiration.
TeMPOraL 9mo ago
Not everyone is in auctions for the game, some people want to actually get the item. Though I imagine there's less and less of them, as most figured out long ago that auctions are a stupid waste of time. In fact, I'm somewhat angry at sellers setting up auctions if there's no other way to acquire a specific item. Why they won't put a minimum price they're happy to part with some items for, instead of wasting time of a lot of people by withholding target price and pretending they're earning premium through work?
cm2187 9mo ago
But if that someone isn't rational it is better to not give him the time to react to your highest bid. Also some sellers seem to use some fake accounts to bid high on their own item, revealing your max bid, then cancel their bid, then bid right under your max bid to maximise their sell price. Happened to me twice, and now no longer setting my max bid in advance since.
- neilfrndes 9mo ago
  I thought eBay doesn't allow you to cancel a bid you placed.
  - cm2187 9mo ago
    It does. You can argue you bid a wrong amount by mistake. It's necessary because mistakes do happen, and it even happened to me to retract a mistake once (was bidding on two items simultaneously in two tabs and mixed them up). But it gets abused.
- ycombinatrix 9mo ago
  What were you buying?
  - cm2187 9mo ago
    Mostly electronics, SSDs, motherboards, etc.
mort96 9mo ago
I don't understand this line of reasoning. I don't do auctions, but if I did, it would be because I want that item. When I want something, I never have an absolute hard price ceiling; if I'm willing to pay $10000, I'm willing to pay $10000.01. I can't imagine anyone who would be happy to pay $X for an item but not $X + $0.01. Like, if I'm at a store and an item costs $500, and I bring it to the checkout and the cashier says "oh sorry that was mislabeled, it's $500.01 not $500", there is no world in which I go "okay never mind then, $500 was my max". There does not exist a situation where I've decided I want something at price $X, but would not buy it at price $X + $0.01, because $0.01 is absolutely negligible. So where does this fantasy of an absolute max price come from?
- direwolf20 9mo ago
  The field of Economics
- thornewolf 9mo ago
  it's because this argument of "what is $0.01 more?" can be extended forever, implying you are willing to pay an infinite amount of money for anything. since we know this is silly, we try to understand what our "real" maximum is. this is difficult to do for exactly the reasons you mention in your comment! surely $0.01 is negligible! there is a tension here. and so, absolute max price is not a fantasy - the world would be absurd if it were - but instead its a real and difficult to construct value
  - mort96 9mo ago
    It can be extended forever in theory, and sure, that is an interesting philosophical discussion, but it isn't in practice. We're discussing sniping. That means you make the choice once: do I send in a last-second bid that's $.01 more than my "max price", or do I not?
    - elzbardico 9mo ago
      If your time has no value for you, sure, keep glued to your machine sending countless counterbids $0.01 higher than the latest bid.