Isn't 6 second of offset too much?

[hjpinheiro]

Hey

Just wondering if the 6 second default of offset isn't too much time before the end of the auction.
Anyone has had luck with 2 seconds or 4 seconds offset? Is the bid actually placed in ebay using so few seconds?
Tell me your experience please.


Best regards

[Cupid]

With a Mirror subscription I use a default offset of 8 seconds, because that provides better outcomes for me, due to not getting caught by the bid increment rule so often.

Anything under about 20 seconds doesn't provide enough time for another bidder to see your bid, decide that they do actually want to pay more than they have already scheduled to bid, and then place that higher bid.

Of course, that doesn't mean you can't win with later bids, you just have to decide that you want to place that bid at least a few minutes before the end of an auction.
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Mark

[hjpinheiro]

[Cupid]

I don't want my bid rejected because it is less than one bid increment more than the auction price, so I want my bid to go in before other snipers get a chance to raise the price to that level.

Since I bid on auctions that are likely to have other snipers placing bids, I find that I win more often with a higher offset than them because of this Ebay rule.

Scheduling snipes with two or three second offsets is reliable, I just find I win less auctions if I use those offsets since my bids get rejected more often, even though I was prepared to pay a bit more than the end price.
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Mark

[Gixen]

[Goobastank]

Can someone tell me how to read these results? Cannot figure out how to attach a picture so I will type it out here:
Bidder (i***4) $88 22 Time: 6:43:26pm PDT
Bidder (I***1) $87.00 Time: 8:12:40pm
Bidder (me) $85.00 Time: 8:12:35pm
Bidder (me) $85.00 Time: 8:12:35pm
Bidder (b***2) $80.00 Time: 6:53:45pm

I am subscribed to mirror service. I see where the mirror submits smy bids from two different servers so I do not take a chance on missing something. I did not write down the exact time thew bid ended. I have seen a previous thread that I think default is 6 or 8 seconds before the bid ends. What story does this list of 5 bids tell about what happened? How did someone submit a bid five seconds after mine? Thanks in advance, Brian [/img]

[Cupid]

Anyone can schedule a bid of any amount to be placed at any time.

The winner of an Ebay auction is always the highest accepted bid.

The winning bid of $88 22 was placed about an hour and a half before your bid.

The under bid of $87.00 was placed 5 seconds after yours, it still lost. You could have scheduled the same bid to be placed at the same time, since you have an active Gixen Mirror subscription, and you would have lost in exactly the same way as they did, since that bid was still lower than the one already placed much earlier.

The default Gixen offset is 6 seconds.

The discussion on this thread is about whether 6 seconds is a more or less successful offset than a lower one. In this case, it made no difference to the outcome as I've just explained.

As an aside, the bidder that placed a bid of $80.00 did so just a few minutes after the winning bid was placed but presumably decided they did not want to pay any more than that for it, so never placed another bid.

I'm not really sure what question you are asking, but if it was, 'Was the later bid a reaction to mine having been placed by Gixen?', the only way to know for certain would be to ask the bidder that owns the account that bid was placed from... if they sat watching the auction ending without having already placed (or scheduled) a bid as high as they were willing to pay they wasted their time as they still didn't win; if they saw a bid raising the price and then decided as a result that they were now interested in it when before they weren't, I believe more of us would be wondering about whether that kind of thinking makes any sense, than we would be admiring how fast they acted on that thought and managed to place a higher bid on Ebay, 5 seconds would undoubtedly be an impressive turn of speed for that though.

It's also quite possible that they scheduled a snipe, of $87.00, to be placed 5 seconds later than yours, and providing that was the maximum that they were willing to pay, I'd say that was quite sensible, provided that was truly the maximum that they were willing to pay. They didn't waste any more time on this auction than you did when you scheduling a lower bid to be placed at an earlier time. If they had chosen to schedule their bid to occur before yours, as I would have done, they would have still lost, in exactly the same way, except that the auction price would have been higher earlier, and as a result your bid of $85.00 would not even have been accepted by Ebay and Gixen would have assigned it a status of 'BID UNDER ASKING PRICE'.

Given the actions of others that we can be certain about, it was never going to be possible to win this auction with an $85 bid, no matter when that bid was placed.

Is that enough of a story, actual, and hypothetical, or do you think there's more to it than that, and if so what else do you think might be possible to deduced ?

Does any of this indicate that Gixens' default offset should be lower ?.. No, not for me it doesn't, but no doubt we'll continue to debate this for as long as it's possible to place bids on Ebay auctions.
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Mark

[goobastank]

Cupid! that was an awesomely detailed answer you provided. I feel like Neo standing in front of the Construct!

Yes, my question in general was "did someone see my bid and then place a bid higher than mine". In this case I see from your description that the highest bid was placed long before anyone would have seen mine. The answer to my question in this instance is no, they did not see my bid.

I have noticed on a few others that I get outbid by exactly a dollar. I know this could be because someone outbid me and has nothing to do with them seeing my bid. It has happened enough times that I wanted to know some details about how long before the bid ends Gixen places my bid.

I think the answer from this thread is 6 seconds. I do not think anyone could see my bid and post a bid a dollar higher in that time. I used to hit the button at 9 seconds. I would get a spinning wheel and then a second dialogue box that said in general " is this what you want to do?" and then I would have to hit yes again. The dialogue box woudl show the counter at 3...2... and then the spinnging wheel again. Sometimes you see "you won", sometimes it says "hold on we are determining the winner".

I would think 6 seconds is not enough time for anyone to see my bid even if they happened to refresh at the right moment. It prompted me to as from being beaten by $1 on multiple bids. The example I provided was not a good example for this exact question and you did an excellent job breaking down the data that was there.

[Cupid]

OK, so we're touching on a different question here:

Q: When I'm the under bidder, how much more is the winner going to have to pay ?

A: No more than one bid increment more than your bid, that's just how Ebay works.

and that is the case no matter whether their accepted bid was 5c more than yours or $500 more. So if $1 is the bid increment in the price range that the auction ends in, then that is always going to be the most likely amount that you will lose by.

Of course that works both ways, if you happened to bid $500 more on an item where the next highest bid was well under $1000, you would not be happy if Ebay then asked you to pay the full amount of your bid... though there are such 'sealed bid' auction formats where that does apply, Ebay does not do that.

That however isn't an encouragement to bid any more than you are actually willing to pay, because you'll only ever actually have to pay a bit more than the next highest accepted bid... because it only takes two bidders, on one auction, to think that way for one of them to end up paying way more for an item than it is worth; I still see that happen way too often.
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Mark

[beautysky]

First time Gixen user and scheduled my first gixen bid for an auction that has zero bids so far but 11 watchers and ends in about 2 days from now

I left default at 6 seconds , my maximum is my maximum so would changing this to 3 have any benefit?

[Cupid]

[Guest]

I always use offset of 3 or 2 seconds. 6 seconds is far too high. 6-8 or even 20 seconds might be good for beating out other snipers, but I think for most people, the main goal is to beat out people, not snipers.

If your going to bid say $250 on an item, and it has a $2 minimum bid increase, you would only loose out to other snipers if they had a bid between $250-$252 and one of them also bid $250 to match yours, but got it in first.

But in my experience, the bidding wars start in the last 2 minutes of an auction. People manually typing in, increasing after each loss. I know this because its what I used to do it. I used to manually place bids 5-2 seconds before auction close and battle snipers even. The battles get heated in the last 20 seconds and IMO your far more likely to have somebody manually increasing their bid to $275+ just to win in the last 10 seconds after they see the price shot up, than you are to lose out to another sniper by $2 who put their near identical bid in before yours.

Keeping the bid as low as possible for as long as possible is the best way to get your item for cheap. If you're bidding 8 seconds before close (via sniper or manually) you're giving a manual person too much time to make a 5 second poor decision and overpay for an item to beat you.

[Cupid]

Granted, the more you are bidding, the less likely you are to value something within one bid increment of another bidder, though it should be noted that bid increments do also increase with the price of the auction.

I'm generally buying items with bids below $50... As I've been consistently saying, it does depend on the specific circumstances of the auction what offset works best for you.
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Mark

[cel]

New Gixen user here, long time ebay... Just recently got back into auctions for finishing an old trading card collection and just lost out on an auction i manually bid ~6 seconds around $500(i usually do a bit random number to account for other ppl bidding at the same time). Anyways I got beat out by someone not sniping but obviously still having time to click the manual bid button from ebay that gives suggested bids that will go through, fair win to them, I should have waited to around 4 seconds to manual bid and I probably would have won.

Anyways good info on this topic, I think for my style I have gleamed thanks to the helpful info from cupid, I could probably do a 3 second snipe because these items are highly competitive in the last few seconds, I just need to increase my bid to take into account an increment raise (or two or three). i.e. instead of a 3 second 501.56 bid, a 512.56 or 524.56 bid etc etc. to account for any 500,510 bid etc.

Anyways good topic and thanks for the info!

[Cupid]