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Originally posted by wilf sorry to sound daft but how is this software different to just putting in the max price you would pay on ebay? doesnt ebay bid for you up to your max bid? if you get outbid does it matter if its by 50p or £5000? |
You put your max bid onto eBay with 5 days to go, and the price gets pushed up incrementally, someone bids, your proxy bid bumps the price up a bit more, then the other person bids a bit more and so on.
With a snipe, you put your max bid in with 5 seconds to go, so no incremental updates and no opportunity for another user to quickly hit "bid now".
If there's a proxy bid in higher than your max snipe, you still lose.
But, you can keep the costs down and increase your chance of winning substantially.
It's been around for almost as long as eBay, and is essentially playing on the fact that a lot of bidders still sit there with 5 minutes to go "just in case".