Am I missing something?

[Guest]

Perhaps I'm incorrect in my thinking, but I thought sniping was essentially to 'beat the clock' against rivals, regardless of 'their' max bid. I say this because the only auctions I ever win are those that either nobody else bid, and, auctions where I happened to have the highest max bid set. Again, I thought the idea was to 'win' an auction in the final moments, basically defeating the clock, which in turn defeats some idiot who has an unrealistic, ridiculously high max bid set. Am I wrong? I so, then what's the point of sniping, except for purpose of bidding on something without having to follow the auction, so forth. Otherwise, why not just set a stupidly high max bid in Ebay and be done with it? I want to defeat any and all those who go high, i.e. save money, win the item.

[Cupid]

Well, you've not got it quite right.

On Ebay the highest accepted bid always wins, no matter when that bid was placed.

So sniping will never win against earlier, higher, bids. In fact there's even a slight disadvantage (to sniping) in that your high bid is more likely to get rejected due to the price having risen and you not meeting the bid increment rule, even though your bid may have even been higher than anyone else's, just not more than one bid increment more.

You might therefore conclude there is no point. However, to do that is to ignore that a fair proportion of bidders have not done the research to find out what something is actually normally worth before placing their bid. They often only start looking into that more when they get outbid and then go to see if they can get it cheaper elsewhere. Sniping does not provide those bidders the opportunity to do that, find out it's worth more than they thought and therefore come back and place a higher bid on the item. So you get it for less than you otherwise would have done if you'd placed an early bid.

Can you win more often by submitting an early ridiculously high bid ?
Yes, of course you can. Before you decide to do that though, consider what happens when someone else adopts the same strategy... one of you wins, for sure, but for a ridiculously high amount, if you are happy to pay the extra money required when that happens go right ahead with that strategy, sniping is not necessary for you.
However, if you want to win at the most economical cost I recommend never bidding, or setting a snipe amount, higher than you are happy to pay for the item.

For further reading, there's a whole page on this subject under the Why Snipe? button. I also recommend that everyone reads the whole of the FAQ page, at least once.
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Mark