What is Sniping on eBay?
Sniping simply means placing your bid on eBay auction a few seconds before it ends.
What are the benefits of Sniping?
By placing your bid in the final seconds of the auction, you avoid bidding wars. If somebody else is interested in the same item,
they won't have enough time to submit higher bid and outbid you.
This strategy is especially useful for collectible, rare or popular items where the value is determined by the people bidding.
In those instances by sniping you can save a lot of money.
Sniping is not magic and has some disadvantages
Sniping will not guarantee you winning an auction. Your bid still has to be higher than the highest bidder.
Also, if your bid is too low, you do not have enough time to increase it.
If done incorrectly, sniping can hurt you by loosing auctions that you would otherwise have won because of proxy bidding.
After you submit your maximum bid, eBay uses bid increments to place your bid based on current highest bidder.
The higher the item goes, the larger bid increments become.
If the maximum bid of the person who is currently the highest bidder is $550, bid increments are $10.
This means that you need to bid at least $10 more to become the highest bidder.
If you try to snipe by setting your maximum bid to $555, your bid will not be accepted by eBay.
In this example you would need to bid at least $560 to become the highest bidder.
Because of proxy bidding, you might not want to place your snipe in the last seconds of the auction.
You might want to place your bid 4 or 7 seconds before the end of auction.
This way your bid will be placed before other snipers and their bid will need to be higher by at least the bid increment to outbid you.
How to Snipe on eBay?
You can snipe manually by waiting until the final seconds of the auction before submitting your bid directly through eBay.
This has disadvantages because you have to be at your computer at the time the item ends. You also have to time your bid just right so you don't submit it too late.
If you do not want to waste your time waiting for the auction to end, use FREE eBay sniping software such as BAM Seeker to snipe for you.
The advantage of this approach is that you can just schedule your snipe and leave the computer running. Your bid will be placed automatically at the right time.