How it started

I'd been an eBay user for years without knowing anything about the art of sniping. I considered myself a fairly seasoned buyer, adept at meandering around eBay, finding bargains and waiting avidly until the last second of auction to try and win them.

I was pretty successful but there were always a confusing number of auction losses, when I know I really should have won an item. I'd put in a good price at the right time but would lose by the smallest of increments. It happened again and again.

It got very frustrating, but I just shrugged it off and decided that it was just down to luck, and that I'd run out of mine on that occasion. I talked about my success/failure rate in auctions with my brother, who runs his own web design agency - he mentioned that earlier in the month he'd discovered and tried a new way of bidding and winning ebay auctions, it was called 'sniping'

I'd been sniped! I felt a bit peeved, but did some research and found out that not only was it a totally legal method of bidding, it was also an online equivalent of a very normal practice in the auction houses - silent bidding, often made via telephone.

In almost 100% of cases the process beats manual registrations of bids - basically you can't beat a sniper - the person using sniping software to make a bid will always win against the bidder not using it as long as he is bidding the same or a slight increment over their amount, often winning by only a few pence more. So, I certainly couldn't beat the snipers so I might as well join them. I signed up for a free trial with an online sniping company and set out to test it for myself.

The test

I trawled through the pages of the auction pages that had 10 minutes to go on eBay, and found a low cost item. It was a small plastic Darth Vader toy - I put down £3.00 as my maximum bid as I didn't want to risk the program getting my bid wrong, okay, I'll admit that I was a bit nervous but this wasn't how I was used to doing things!

The bid

I checked all my info I'd inputted a few extra times, and then clicked 'place bid'. The message came up told me that the bid had been placed on my behalf. I stared at the screen.

I didn't need to - there was a whole 10 minutes to go, but as it slowly dawned on me that I didn't actually have to be at the computer to actually make the bid happen anymore, I went to the kitchen, poured myself a cup of coffee and then came back to watch the final moments of auction.

The result

You probably guessed by now (and by the title of this article), that I won - of course. What probably hooked me to sniping is that in the last minute of auction around 4 other people made bids on the same item, my item, and one of the bids was the same price as mine. The thrill was that I had won - without doing anything - or so it felt. I was thrilled. Darth Vader was mine and I'd found a new way to win on eBay! I was no longer an ordinary bidder, I was an Auction Sniper!

Later on (with a bit more courage from my earlier success) I tried the eBay tool on a small portable TV for my bedroom - I won that auction too, and because the item was sniped ie. Not bid through eBay itself (like a silent bidder, or telephone bid in auction houses), no-one saw my interest in the TV (which was a rather nice Sony) and therefore no bidding wars were started and therefore the item went to me at the lowest price possible. Result.

Why did I make my own?

Like a lot of people, I love winning, winning at anything, love, darts, football, snap - anything. I particularly love winning on eBay. This is why I decided to become a real auction sniper aficionado and start my own sniping site. But why would I bother to start my own site, when there were other sniping sites showing us all 'how to win on eBay' left right and centre?

Well, even though the other sites usually worked ok, they were all ugly and hard to navigate through. It was as if they'd been made for people who knew about programming but not much about design and ease of use. Sometimes during my research I found that even would give up halfway through the registration process of other sites - they just didn't make sense sometimes and got me frustrated. I wanted simplicity. I'm a bit lazy and don't want to have to work out something that should be easy to do.

I couldn't even persuade my best mate to try sniping because he couldn't understand how to given the scrappy sites that were on offer. Some useful feedback I took from him was that if no trouble was taken on the design and use of a site - any site, how they could be truly trusted to do a dependable job?

The site!

So, surprise surprise, I made a site! A brand spanking new sniping site - it's up and running, it works very well indeed and looks great.

I'm a believer based on experience, so obviously I'd like to recommend to each reader of this article who uses eBay to try sniping for themselves, turn themselves into an eBay Sniper and see what savings they can make and how much time it frees up.

With internet-based sniping sites such as mine, you don't even have to have your computer switched on for the snipe to go through, so instead of hovering over the mouse button to make your last second bid, a sniping site will do it for you. This is obviously a great time saving strategy, as well as a money saving one. But is it really worth it? Does eBay sniping get real results?

Here's what a South Korean team at Seoul National University found. They produced a master equation for how bidding proceeds (it's nk(t+1) -- nk(t) = w(k-1)(t)*n(k-1)(t) -- wk(t)*nk(t) + sigma(k,1)*u(t), and then tested it against a massive number of auction records, some 264,073 items sold in one day on eBay and another 287,018 items sold in one year by eBay's Korean partner. **

Our analysis explicitly shows that the winning strategy is to bid at the last moment as the first attempt rather than incremental bidding from the start." The study appears in the Physical Review E journal.

**Source: USA TODAY

Article: On eBay, it pays to snipe

Dated: 6/25/2006

So, it really does work. Not that many people have discovered auction sniping, so the opportunity to gain a bidding advantage has never been better.

A an ebay sniper you can also bid for multiple items, search for the best price of multiple items - the list of features we're creating with a view to adding to the site is growing week by week, and more and more people are signing up and using the service we offer. It's turned into a full time business as users recommend friends to us and word spreads.

It goes without saying that I'd encourage everyone to use my site to snipe on eBay, but the bigger message of this article is that if you do buy anything at all on eBay, and want to have the best chances of winning - you've really got to consider last minute bidding seriously and start winning more and more auctions!

Good luck, thanks for reading and happy bidding!