Something on ebay I want,no NEED. I know what I will pay for it,should I bide my time or jump in early.If I put the most I will pay for it in and I am not the highest bidder I can go to plan b.(Buy something else)

Hahahaha! good title!

It depends I guess on the wanty/neediness of the thing.

Can’t be without it – steam in with a nice high bid.
Really wanty ( but able to continue living without it ) – get yourself a sniping program.

put in an early feeler bid. see if anyones got a big max bid in there. always leave room for maneuver in the last few minutes…

don’t use a sniper program, its just not cricket

Wait til near the end of the auction then steam in with your highest bid very close to the end.

Always wait until as late as possibly before you bid. Use an online bid system eg. auctionsniper to bid for you as it has 3 advantages. The first is that you set your highest bid price then forget about it, the second is that you cannot be tempted to pay more than you want if things go silly in the last few minutes and thirdly, you don’t have to watch the auction or miss bidding if your line drops/computer dies.

It costs pennies and well worth it IMO.

Edit

don’t use a sniper program, its just not cricket

It’s not a game 🙄

Why ever show your hand until the very last moment? You are only giving others something to chip away at so they will go the extra mile to beat you or move you up to closer to the max you were prepared to pay. The only time waiting until the last minute does not work is if you are unsure what the buyer’s reserve is and it is too late to put another bid in (but if you have put the max it’s worth to you on in the first place this is an irrelevance) or if there is no reserve and the seller gets cold feet and cancels the auction before the end to stop it going for less than they had hoped.

The problem with snipers is that other people use them.

I was against them on principle until after about the thousandth time of missing an item I really wanted I got annoyed.

Forget thinking about them as snippers and think of it as a way of turning ebay into a sealed bid system – which seems a better system anyway.

snipe

put in an early feeler bid. see if anyones got a big max bid in there. always leave room for maneuver in the last few minutes…

don’t use a sniper program, its just not cricket

Daft methodology there. Once you stick in an early bid all you do is up the price of the item. If someone is interested in it they’ll spot someone else bidding and consider raising their game in a mad “I will win” rush near the end.

Sit and wait, put in your max and snipe. There’s nothing wrong with it, it’s not a game with rules – you’re trying to buy something for a low price, not participate in a days gameplay of open-hand poker.

There’ve been lots of game theory articles on this. To be honest the best policy depends on who you are bidding against.

Once I was after a Chariot trailer and was bidding against someone who wanted to be the top bidder all the time. So I’d bid, they’d trump me. Drove the auction really high this way. Bit silly though I should’ve sniped, but I was on my mobile at the time. I could’ve won the auction for far less this way – in the end I let it go.

If you are bidding against a load of lurkers though then it’s hard. You might try and draw them out with some bids, but chances are you won’t know til the last second, so sniping is again your only option, and you’ll have to hope your bid is high enough.

Sit watching the last 15 minutes irrespective of where you are/what you’re doing and bid with 3 seconds to go with you’re very highest maximum allowance.

If it goes for more, hey-ho.

In theory, we should all decide what we think something is worth, what we are willing to pay, and set our maximum bid to that, regardless of how long is left.

And that would work fine if everyone did that, whoever valued it highest would get it, everyone else would be happy that it was too expensive for them.

However, they don’t, everyone gets excited over auctions and end up battling it out to see who can pay over the odds the most usually. Which leaves anyone doing it the “right” way left way behind. So if you can’t beat them, join them. Wait till there’s 5 seconds left then put in your absolute maximum plus a few pence.

The issue there Andituk is that if you are prepared to pay £50 for something you are usually prepared to pay £52 or £60 too. And you can persuade yourself that it’s worth £65 too.. probably some sort of psychology going on that says ‘well if they want it it must be good therefore I’ll up my bid’ and so on.

In theory, we should all decide what we think something is worth, what we are willing to pay, and set our maximum bid to that, regardless of how long is left.

And that would work fine if everyone did that, whoever valued it highest would get it, everyone else would be happy that it was too expensive for them.

However, they don’t, everyone gets excited over auctions and end up battling it out to see who can pay over the odds the most usually. Which leaves anyone doing it the “right” way left way behind. So if you can’t beat them, join them. Wait till there’s 5 seconds left then put in your absolute maximum plus a few pence.

QFT.

molgrips – that’s why you snipe with your maximum and then walk away. If you lose, you’ll never know what the winners maximum was, you just have to learn and walk away.

Dissociate your emotions from a transaction. That’s what sniping helps you do, so you don’t get carried away. Think long and hard, make your decision and act once.

Can’t believe there’s any debate! Never ever ever ever bid until the last 10 seconds. Why would you?

I use auctionstealer.com – 2 or 3 free snipes a week and you don’t need to worry about it.

Very last minute for me every time. Plus I always set my maximum price in my head before things get going. If it goes over what I set, walk away. You can end up paying ten, twenty quid over what you first thought was reasonably very easily.

This is all just psychology.

You pick the price you can live with and you go with it. The timing doesn’t matter. If you end up getting emotionally involved then you need to have a word with yourself, no one ‘Wins’ at auction you just offer to pay more than anyone else!

What’s QFT?

You pick the price you can live with

But that’s the problem – it’s a vague area and that price is not one value because it depends on other things.

The timing doesn’t matter

The timing does matter, because other people do get emotionally involved, if you bid late it gives people less time to get over excited and bid higher, meaning your highest bid has a better chance of being the winning bid.

What Stuey01 said – timing is everything. People don’t bid their max right off.

My point is most people put their high bid in in the last hour or the last minute. if your bid is in early and is higher it makes no difference you will win.

If the price goes high early then people have a lot of time to think about it / not get emotional and then leave it. It works both ways which is why i dont think it matters when you bid.

Wait till the end and use amounts 1 or 2p more than standard amounts, eg 26.52.

My point is most people put their high bid in in the last hour or the last minute. if your bid is in early and is higher it makes no difference you will win.

Disagree, the early bids influence the decisions of later bidders and lead to higher maximum bids.

“Disagree, the early bids influence the decisions of later bidders and lead to higher maximum bids”

I disagree – very low price towards the end of an auction can lead to lots of interest and people getting excitable!

Sniper is the only way to go…

There was an academic paper written on this and they concluded, IIRC, that if you want a high rate of success for a lower price you need to snipe as entering early artificially raises the price and gets people into a subconscious bidding war.

Sniper is the only way to go.

Agreed. You know your price – put it on a Snipe, leave it. You get it, great. You don’t, you haven’t paid over the odds.

Notice I don’t use ‘win’ or ‘lose’. I see it as “Buying stuff”, not playing a game to see who can spend the most. 🙂

Part of the issue is ebays proxy bid system, I don’t like it. Get two bidders willing to pay a high value for an item and neither will get a good deal as it bids up to their max. In reality and in sniping there’s the possibility you’ll beat the other user to the last second securing a bargain.

It’s amazing how many people can’t understand that the ‘bid’ you put in is not your actual bid but your max bid, and the consequences of this.

Get two bidders willing to pay a high value for an item and neither will get a good deal as it bids up to their max

But that’s classic auction behaviour innit? It just saves all the tedious ‘do I hear 500, do I hear 510..’ stuff in between.

always a last minute bid….but dont worry cos it will get bid up by all and sundry and end up more than you wanted to pay…there’s never any great deals on ebay these days (he says slightly jaded and disillusioned). I have a lot more success with STW classifieds.

Aye- put in yer max bid with seven seconds or so to go, or use a sniping programme……….early bids only serve to push the amount up.

But that’s classic auction behaviour innit? It just saves all the tedious ‘do I hear 500, do I hear 510..’ stuff in between.

No, it’s not. In a real auction you put in a bid, someone thinks, outbids, thinks, outbids etc. In a system where your bid rate and price is governed by the chaps taking a cut it ulrimately means that if both people are absolutely fixed with their final bid price then the price of the object goes to the max +n of the cheapest persons limit pretty much instantly. Putting in intermediate prices is pointless and just serves to identify a possible bargain.

If you’re going to go with max bids the auction might as well not have a time limit, other than for the seller advertising it, as there’s no chance of a bargain.

i have missed out using snipes when my max price is a big jump from the current price.

not sure why…

i’d be inclined to contact bidder outside ebay early. make sure they know that you are sure and you will be in a strong position if you miss out and it falls through. got offered a bike at 50% of reserve that way. shame as i spent the £ on a night out in the mean time. oh what it was to be young…

it ultimately means that if both people are absolutely fixed with their final bid price then the price of the object goes to the max +n of the cheapest persons limit pretty much instantly

Mmm but does the timing of bids mean anything? In your scenario would it make a difference if it made that price after 1 day or with 1 min to go?

IMHO the last thing you want to be doing is thinking on the hoof within the last couple of minutes.

Put in the max bid you’d be happy to pay for the item and wait. Some you win some you don’t….and you don’t always end up paying your max bid either.

SB

molgrips – Member

Once I was after a Chariot trailer and was bidding against someone who wanted to be the top bidder all the time. So I’d bid, they’d trump me. Drove the auction really high this way. Bit silly though I should’ve sniped, but I was on my mobile at the time. I could’ve won the auction for far less this way – in the end I let it go.

I sold my Chariot a couple of years back for an insane price on eBay. Was a nice bit of kit, but I was very surprised/ pleased! Maybe that was you….. 😀

Ebay is full of stuff people WANT, but not NEED. If you don’t get it – did you really NEED it?

On the other hand if it’s my old car you want to buy feel free to bid up as high as you like 😛

Toby;it is the frame I need to turn my recent purchases into a bike,so I NEED it.Just found out I will be in the Cairngorms when it finishes,so going to bid max afore I go.PS it is not a real monkey,the title was misleading,and that is against ebay rules.