eBay Tools
Do any of you use any different programs or anything to assist you with eBay? I've always just waited until 5 seconds left in an auction to throw down my highest bid, but the way some of you talk about sniping is like there are programs out there that do it for you.
Comments
you have to give them your eBay user ID and password so that they can bid on your behalf. That's what I use, and haven't had any problems with it so far. And best of all it's free.
-Dain
-Dain
I've noticed that as well, despite the time I tell it to use. The other problem/bug I've noticed is that if two users on the site are sniping the same item, only one of them registers. Which one, I'm not sure, but I realize that Nick and I were both sniping the same lot a while back, and my snipe didn't even register (I would have outbid Nick, sorry!). This is just a theory, but from a programming POV, I could see how this is possible. If two snipes are set for the same item at the same time, if the system isn't dynamic enough to account for this, it has to "pick" which one to use. How it does that is unknown, but if his snipe was created prior to mine, that would make some sense.
-Dain
If this is the case, it should take the highest snipe and enter it in. Only makes sense. I've used this same program a couple of different times and I feel it's pretty good. But most of the time I just do a manual snipe. I mean, that is how I won a CIB Color A Dinosaur with all papers and 3/4 of the shrinkwrap still on it with like 5 seconds to go
If this is the case, it should take the highest snipe and enter it in. Only makes sense.
This sounds like it might make sense but there's a problem in that if both snipes are above anyone else's max. bid, and only one gets entered, the seller doesn't benefit from the difference in the two snipestreet bids. Also, since this is the case and snipestreet won't "outbid itself" with conflicting snipes, then who bid higher is irrelevant, someone's getting a bargain arbitrarily.
Dain, I think the bug might come from how the snipe is triggered. If it simply checks to see if the time=10 seconds from close for a particular snipe, and it's busy in a subroutine with that one while time passes, by the time the next identical one comes up it will no longer be equal to 10 seconds, it will be 9.8 seconds. I wonder if the code would be improved by a 0<time<=10 check or if the programmer made a choice to not use this to avoid bugs/quicken it up/keep code simple. If two independant items were closing at the exact same second this bug could potentially arise as well.
Perhaps he's also just using a 1-dimensional data structure so the second snipe is never seen. This could be kept quick and made more robust by using a 2d linked list.
-Dain
I use my own snipping. I just open 2 pages one with the bid ready to confirm and other to refresh. usally get a bid in with a second or two left. If your bidding on a bunch of auctions would probally wouldnt have time to do it yourself. Of course if someone put in a high bid any sniping would be useless.
I'm with wrldstrman on this one, exactly the same tactics I deploy. I've got a wall mounted clock by my pc's that is automatically tuned into GMT every night at midnight and thus runs at exactly the same time as ebay. Hence if something is finishing at 25 seconds past the minute, a bid will go in at something like 23 seconds past the minute of the clock to allow for thr page to load up etc and its usually heading my way a few seconds later, lol.
I've never bidded with anything more than 10 seconds to go in about 2.5 years of ebay, even if nobody else has bidded I still bide my time.