How to Stop eBay Auction Sniping
By Lissa Jannini
Every day, hapless bidders get beaten to the punch by
auction snipers who jump in at the last minute. I know how
annoying it can be, as I once had it happen to me three
times in a row on the same item! The thing is that the only
people who can help the poor bidders are us, the sellers.
The Problem.
Bidders will bid on an item and then wait for days until it
finishes, only to have someone else outbid them at the last
minute. In a traditional auction at a real auction house,
this isn’t a problem at all, as the auction keeps going
until everyone has bid as much as they want to, and the
auctioneer double-checks with the classic phrase “going,
going, gone".
The problem on eBay is caused by the fixed length of time
that eBay’s auctions last, and the fact that they aren’t
extended significantly if someone places a new bid in the
last few seconds of the auction. Imagine if a real auction
house worked that way, letting people shout “50 cents
more!" at the last second and win an item. It would simply
be unfair, and many buyers think it’s unfair on eBay too.
The Solutions.
Until eBay decide to fix the problem (and by now it’s
looking unlikely that they ever will), you’re the only one
who can do anything for your buyers.
First off, you can encourage your buyers to use eBay’s
proxy bidding system the way it was intended. The idea of
the system is that they enter the maximum they’re willing
to pay for an item and eBay places bids for them
automatically up to that maximum. They’re not supposed to
come back and bid an extra dollar every time they get
outbid.
If your bidders are bidding high enough, then no sniper
will even come along and beat them – because they will have
set the maximum snipe level in their sniping software to
less than the normal bidder’s maximum. Changing the way
people use eBay is hard, though.
One alternative is to keep an eye on who’s bidding on your
auction, and cancel bids from known snipers – but this
requires you to be around right at the end of the auction
to cancel their bids. You might also want to set your
auction to end sometime when bidders will be around so that
they can outbid snipers themselves. This is good business
sense anyway – most of the bidding always takes place in
the last few hours of an auction.
An easier way to thwart bid snipers is to offer ‘Second
Chance’ sales to bidders who get outbid by a sniper at the
last minute. This is good for you, and for them – they
still get to buy the item they wanted, and you’ve just made
two sales: one to the sniper and one to them.
Learn everything you need to know about creating,
getting your hands on and selling the most profitable
kind of products you can possibly sell on eBay
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