Fletch521

..and I would like some cheeeese with my whine

Chombi

You lost that beautiful tandem by a measely nine cents??!!.................red or white??........

Chombi

khatfull

What amount did you use to snipe? I have won snipes by $0.01....literally. Always bid $101.67, something like that.

bigbossman 

How did you determine the other bidder's max bid?

love2pedal.com

Slowly keep rebidding on the item until you become high bidder.

Then, if you have no problem with it, withdrawal your bids.

I think you can't withdrawal a bid within 12 hours of the item closing

rhm

I guess you and the other guy agree on the value of the item, anyway. I've been sniped for very low amounts before, but not nine cents low.

khatfull

-1000

Don't bid what you're not willing to pay, period.

randyjawa 

Shameful advice in my opinion!

wrk101

+10 You really have no idea what the other bidder bid. You only know they bid more than you.

Always, always, always, snipe your maximum. +1 and always an odd figure. Do not base your bid on what the bidding is currently at. Many people do not bid until the very end, so the current bidding level often has nothing in common with the final price. Base your bid on what the item is worth to you. If your maximum is $100, then snipe $103.79, or something similar. And if someone else then wins the item, so what, it was worth more to them than it was to you, even if that difference is just 9 cents.

+1000 Do not play games with bidding and then canceling bids. Someday, you may just want to sell something on ebay, its just bad karma. I really do not care what someone else is willing to bid for an item. That has absolutely nothing to do with what the item is worth to me. And a smart competing bidder will not bid until the final 5 to 10 seconds, so there is no time to figure it out anyway. On my last buy, I bid with six seconds left. That was my only bid on the item. And of course, my snipe program does it automatically, I do not sit there trying to time it for the exact last moment. I never bid during an auction until the last six seconds. There is no benefit to me disclosing my interest to other potential bidders, particularly those newb's that tend to raise their bids when they see other bidders. And if I had been beat out on that item, no problem, as it then went for more than it was worth to me.

Values on ebay are kind of wild. Some stuff goes way over market, some stuff goes under market.

rhm

Let's say the item closes sometime tomorrow, and the current bid is $10.

Now I bid a hundred; current price goes up to $11. I am happy, thinking I'm getting it for $11.

Now Fletch thinks he can have this for $12! But just to be sure, he puts in a snipe at $100.09.

His bid goes in a few seconds before the item closes; since his bid is more than a dollar over the current price of $11, ebay accepts the bid. My bid is automatically raised to $100, which isn't good enough; his bid would automatically raise even higher, but his maximum was $100.09, so that's what he pays.

Of course, I didn't really want that Campy **** anyway!

Citoyen du Monde

This is not true, if the winning bidder's final visible bid is less than the next incremental bid, it means that is precisely what they bid. If on the other hand their bid was teh next incremental bid, you have no way of knowing what their bid was. If the difference was indeed 9 cents, that is precisely the difference between the two bids.

bigbossman 

This was my point. The OP did not get beat out by 9 cents - the other bidder just had an oddball higher snipe bid than him. Could have been anything.

rhm

No, you're wrong. Citoyen du Monde (and I) got it right. Sorry!

mike_s

Ditto. Only an unprincipled, immoral reprobate would retract a bid (unless they legitimately made a mistake, such as adding an extra digit). That's apparently what "love2pedal.com" is. It's not only unethical, but illegal (as a bid is a binding contract), and the perp is depending upon difficulty/distance/just-not-worth-bothering, etc. to not get charged/sued.

beech333

Citoyen du Monde and RHM are right. Fletch got beat by 9 cents.

If it were worth a dime more to him, then he should have bid it.

buck mulligan

Technically, no. A bid is an offer; there is no contract without an offer, an acceptance, and consideration.

I'm just being a persnickety lawyer, though - your main point (it's unethical) is spot-on. It's also probably a violation of the terms of service.

AndyK 

If eBay would go to the format Yahoo Auctions offered years back, this wouldn't happen. If the item ends in 1 minute, and a sniper comes in and bids, the auction is extended another 15 minutes. It keeps doing that until someone pays what they want to pay, and everyone else loses. No more sniping, and sellers get fair market value.

tugrul

And eBay would presumably make more money unless that change somehow drove people away. I don't see why this would bother a seller, and buyers are stuck with the fact that eBay is one of the few markets large enough to have certain items.

conspiratemus1

Yes, I guess you're right. The bid becomes a legally binding contract only when the seller has accepted it. The bid is merely an offer to enter into a binding contract. But if you retract what turns out to be the highest bid (which the seller of course accepts), the seller can still hold you to it, right? That's certainly the way it works in buying and selling houses. If you have buyer's remorse and want to walk away from a house you've put an offer in on, you'd better hope that someone comes along with a higher bid to get you off the hook.

But certainly agree that bad-faith bidding is unethical. Fer shure.

michael k

unterhausen

this is why I always snipe at the absolute maximum I'm willing to pay. I do a soul-searching session with myself where I decide what I'm willing to pay and not one cent more. So if I lose by a penny I'm not all that unhappy.

repechage

I've won by 19 cents and lost by a penny, so it is.

Fletch521

I know the system, just got lazy on this auction. Put in a Max Bid and went to bed. As it turned out I found another identical item with a buy it now 1 cent lower than what my max bid was (9.99 vs. 10.00) So the guy that sniped me paid to much and saved me a dime :-)

guygadois 

This is actually the worst eBay advice I have heard. Seriously.

gitarzan

I take two angles. I'll either just put in my max bid and forget about it, following it on emails. Or snipe it with about 15 seconds to go. 15 seconds seems to be the point where my reflexes manage to hit the button and drop in a bid with 3 or 4 seconds left. I'll bid a reasonable bid, unless for some reason I really want it, then I may bid above what it's normally worth trying to be preemptive, but still you never know. I've bid higher than what I thought anyone other sane person would bid and still got beat. You never really know. I was pretty frantic about bidding on guitar pedals for awhile there.