Ducati Sporting Club UK > General > Idle Chat > Ebay bidding

[Lee1980]

New to ebay just registered yesterday, due to seeing something really cheap for my 748s.

I have never bid before and not sure how best to go about it to win said item. Only one person has bid on it so far.

Will it be best to wait until the close of the auction at the last minute and put a bid on, or bid now the highest I'm prepared to pay?

Also heard that you can open mutlitple windows and bid quicker this way at the end of the auction?

Anyone got any advice for ebay virgin

[TP]

If you really want the item you don't want to be mucking around with manual bidding at the end because you're waiting for pages to refresh etc ...

What you want is some snipe software - it will do it all for you and the beauty of it is that you can set the maximum payment you want it to put on for you and it will only bid in the last few seconds or whatever you set it to. This is how I won a complete set of fairings for my 996 - the auction price jumped £150 in the last 10 seconds - if I wasn't sniping I would never have won it.

[nathanhu]

what program are you using ??

[NBs996]

Lee, I'm no e-bay expert mate, but have bought a few things off there.
What I do is first decide the maximum I'm willing to pay, then with litterally a few seconds left I'll bid my max. This doesn't mean I PAY the max, it will only ever go one increment higher than someone elses max... that way I either win the auction without getting into a bidding war and pushing the price up, or lose it because there's another proxy bid higher than mine, in which case it's more than I wanted to pay anyway!
Get my drift??

I'm sure there's plenty of e-bay gods about to tell me I'm off my trolley though!!!

good luck with it mate,
nb

[Lee1980]

I guess NBs idea is best then I won't end up paying more than I wanted to for it, dont want to get carried away first go at it.

[moto748]

I don't think sniping software is a panacea: at the end of the day you still have to make a decision in advance as to what your max bid will be.

If you decide an item is worth no more than, say, £50 to you, but it eventually goes for £52, you may well think, oh, I'd have paid that. But that person who won it with a £52 bid may have actually had an £80 max bid. There's no way you could know. I think you have to accept that some things will slip through your grasp. Another point is that many of the people bidding are simply intending to re-sell; they don't want the goods for themselves. But there may be a price which makes it uneconomic for the re-sellers, but still represents a worthwhile buy for the guy who wants the parts for himself.

Hope this makes sense!

[TP]

My snipe software is just called snipe

Moto748 is absolutely right - you still have to determine beforehand the price that you are willing to pay - because once you get to 5 seconds out where the snipe software kicks in (or 7 seconds if you set it to 7 seconds - whatever) there's no going back.

The reason I advocate sniping is that it connects to e-bay, syncs to e-bay time (crucial for that last second snipe) and automatically increments your bids to whatever price will win the auction within the max price that you've already set. It takes all the hassle out and there are auctions you simply will not win without it. Ultimately if someone else is using snipe software and has a higher max bid than you they will win but you will beat someone who is doing it manually who would pay more than you, and your max may have been lower - they would never know because you can't bid that quickly without snipe software.

I hope that makes sense. I am no e-bay legend, I've only ever bought that one item but I work in IT doing design work so I understand the technical principles of snipe software and value the automation. The rest is really up to you - how much you are willing to put the max bid to, how late you want to set the wnipe software to bid (should depend on your connection to the internet - broadband V dial-up etc, bearing in mind you need to be connected at the time the auction ends).

Apparently there is a snipe website you can use so you don't need to be online at the time and it manages the bid for you - never checked it out and never used it so I can't comment.

Hope this makes sense.

TP

[brownrigby]

Well I SELL and BUY on e-bay with great results,if it's about buying a item it doesn't matter about anything more then what you are prepared to pay.I set a price and wait till a reasonable time till the end of auction and put it on,if someone catches my bid up and overtakes then it's more then i wanted to pay anyway.Oh and not sporting but always worth a e-mail to the seller and ask to end early!! some will for the right price rather than risk a lower end of auction price,also this saves on sellers fee's (comission).

[antonye]

Nick is right - this is the best way to win stuff.

Also take heed of what moto748 says - you never know just how much the other person has bid, so set your maximum and go in with a few minutes to spare.

If there are no bids on an item and it's been going a few days, I'll often put in a low bid just to register my interest - it also stops people taking items off ebay and selling to someone who has emailed an offer to them.

It's some skill and a bit of luck. Unfortunately with Ducati items the seller always knows the right words to put in so everyone finds it and prices seem to be fair - you'll very rarely get a real bargain.

[electricsheep]

I am interested in what advantage sniping software gives over just putting your maximum bid on ebay itself as that also automatically increments only when there are other bids (up to your maximum). Also if 2 people have the same maximum bid the first one put into ebay wins