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You gotta be ready to ninja bid. It's the only way to really get what you want. If you just put in your highest bid up front, you're most likely gonna lose it. It doesn't help (you) that the eBay app does live countdowns by the second so you can easily do it at the very last second.
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I just gave up on bidding years ago because of this. If I can't "buy it now" I just don't even see it. I may miss things, but I don't miss the diappointment.
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Much more irritating is my recent experience of logging in 15 minutes before an auction I was watching was supposed to end, only to discover that the seller has ended it four days early after a single bid.
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Therefore if you lose, it doesn't sting as bad. But it does really suck when you lose it to someone who only bid 50 cents more than you. To be fair, that person may have put in a bid 50 DOLLARS more than you but the app increased it to 50 cents because you didn't counter bid (due to time or whatever). eBay doesn't automatically bang the total to the highest amount the other person put in. It'll just keep going up in increments until it passes that person's max.
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Well, I remember the good old days of eBay when the auctions were actual auctions and real humans were placing bids so things unfolded in real-time. But in the past 15 or so years it has been inundated with bot bidders that automatically bid in microseconds based on pre-set parameters, but also will use algorithms to input shill bids to force others to pay more. The bot-bidding is way more rampant than shill bidding, but I did have ebay step in at one point for a shill-bidder auction. So, yeah - I don't like bidding anymore - against robots is not fun.
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Oh! And I just remembered in the early days of eBay I'd set up "bidding music"! It was usually "Shuttle Tydirium Approaches Endor" from RETURN OF THE JEDI, and I'd time it so that it ends when the auction ends. And since that cue plays Vader's theme, it always had a nice mix of good and bad so whether I won or lost the auction, there was always an element of mystery. Plus, bidding was fun and more reasonable back then so if I won, great, and if I lost, I saved myself from spending money!
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In the year 2021 do you people really not know about the snipe bidding sites, which is how all those last-minute bids come in. Go too esnipe.com, register (free) and you, too, can enter snipe bids that will automatically happen five seconds before the auction closes.
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In the year 2021 do you people really not know about the snipe bidding sites, which is how all those last-minute bids come in. Go too esnipe.com, register (free) and you, too, can enter snipe bids that will automatically happen five seconds before the auction closes. Do they deal in nanoseconds?
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In the year 2021 do you people really not know about the snipe bidding sites, which is how all those last-minute bids come in. Go too esnipe.com, register (free) and you, too, can enter snipe bids that will automatically happen five seconds before the auction closes. That's old news, but was the first annoying thing that started to ruin ebay after the first 5 years of it running as a normal auction site. It was and still is justifiably critiqued because it requires no effort from the bidder themselves. There is no real-world equivalent of it - one has to be physically present at a given moment in time during a real-world auction to place a bid. But that's just the beginning. It is the precursor to high-frequency trading that has nearly destroyed the stock market and also led to an artificial increase in prices for cables and property values as frenzied speculators purchased up real estate to be as physically close to the stock exchange as possible so their algorithm trades could be nanoseconds faster than other traders who were slightly further away. All of which paved the road to bots, which, are even worse than sniping because not only do they artificially drive up prices, but if they happen to win, the accounts disappear, items are not paid for, and the same item from the same seller will appear again. In short, your sniping practices and the pollution of bots has led to the majority of items being listed as "buy it now" and eBay is essentially just a used-goods market, with prices that are no longer competitive with big retailers like Amazon, which only pushes more people to places like Amazon. It also has paved the way for society to view with ambivalence, bots and algorithmic interactions occurring in places where humans also interact, which is extremely dangerous. You can still win with last-second, manually-inputted bids if you know in advance how much you really are willing to pay for an item and if you've probably observed an auction in advance to ensure to a reasonable level of certainty that it doesn't have snipe buyers or bots floating around to shill bid.
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