As I said, if you just find something at the last minute, then it cannot be helped, but to set out to intentionally snip something away from other bidders is underhanded. I realize that one might think, ‘if they really wanted it, they should have been watching the page’, but even that doesn’t work because you have to constantly refresh and sometimes computers slow down, etc and prevent the previous high bidder from making another bid in time.įrequent users of ebay try to avoid this practice in the sense of fair play. If the sniper has done this with less than one minute left, it is unlikely that the former high bidder will receive their email in time to make a higher bid. A sniper, can go in, and up bid, until they reach over the 10.01 limit.Īt that time, the person with the 10.01 bid would be sent an automatic email, if their account is so set up, to let them know they have been outbid. someone has their bid at 10.01 and are the high bidder, and the current bid is 7.50. The reason it is frowned upon is that it does not give people time to respond to up their bids if they are the winning bidder at the time of the sniping.įor instance. I only refer to you as ‘underhanded’ if you continue to use the practice after being notified that it is frowned upon. See Also: 4 eBay Tricks That’ll Score You a BIG Deal You failed in your note to point out why this is a bad technique or how it harms anyone. I was simply passing along what I thought at the time was a technique that I thought was helpful. Case closed.Īs you do not know me, or anything about me, I do not appreciate you calling me “underhanded”. If this is such an issue, eBay could easily take care of it by automatically extending the auction time if a last-second bid is placed. I have never heard of this term ‘sniping’, nor did I know it was as issue that people frowned upon. My response: (Looking back, I might have over reacted)

PLEASE DO NOT USE THIS SNEAKY PRACTICE, AND IF YOU MUST, PLEASE DO NOT TELL OTHERS TO BE AS UNDERHANDED AS YOU ARE. OBVIOUSLY, IF YOU DO A SEARCH, AND ONLY FIND AN ITEM RIGHT BEFORE IT EXPIRES, THAT HAPPENS, AND IS ACCEPTABLE, BUT WAITING UNTIL THE LAST FEW SECONDS TO MAKE YOUR ONLY BID IS NOT. PERHAPS YOU ARE NOT AWARE, BUT PUTTING IN BIDS ON ITEMS ON EBAY IN THE LAST FEW SECONDS IS CALLED ‘SNIPING’ AND IT IS HEAVILY FROWNED UPON BY EBAY AND MOST OF ITS USERS. This was brought to my attention by Susan, a reader of The Dollar Stretcher, who wrote me an email that went like this:

This almost always guarantees I will not be outbid and get the best deal possible.Īpparently this technique, known as ‘Sniping’, is heavily frowned upon by many online auction users. In the article I discussed how I often will wait until the last 30 seconds of an eBay auction before I bid. I wrote an article a while back that was published by The Dollar Stretcher that talked about, among other things, eBay bargain secrets.

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