On Mar 27, 2004, at 11:19 PM, Robert L Cochran wrote:
> I've decided not to shop on Ebay again. The site seems infested with
> dealers, not many truly private sellers, and the high use of sniping
> and
> automated bidding really turns me off. I suspect that the dealers bid
> on
> their own auctions to drive the price of an item up -- there is no way
> to prove that another bidder is not the seller of the item.

As far as the sniping goes, you're sitting at a computer -- let it do
that job for you.  Plenty of software out there to do that.

Type in your maximum amount of money you'd be willing to pay for the
item (thus, you're ultimately in control) and tell the software to do
its thing.  Pretty simple to manage that "problem" really.

You can either let eBay's autobid do it for you, or you can buy
software that will keep your bids in your machine  (and your interest
in the item to yourself) until the last minute and that will watch the
price for you and not bother to bid if it goes above what you're
willing to pay.

Either the item goes for more than you are willing to pay, or it
doesn't... it's not a shopping mall...

Nothing to get emotional over... and certainly easy to counter with the
technology at hand.

Granted, in a REAL auction if there were still people bidding at the
end, the time to bid would be extended.  eBay could counter sniping
completely by not having hard time limits... someone bids in the last
two minutes, the auction is extended a 1/2 hour.  That'd be good.

Nate Duehr, nate@natetech.com

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