Open Forum → help - how to bid on eBay and win?

say I want to buy this item - »www.ebay.com/itm/Samsung ··· 934cef33

someone was mentioning some good way to bid on eBay and win ..

like not to bid right away but to wait until last hour.. makes sense..

what else? what are other good standard practical ways?

someone else mentioned using some automated service to auto bid in the last minute .. any good online auto service to do so?

what do you think?

please advise ..

Determine the max you are willing to pay for the item, place that bid. If someone is willing to pay more for it, you will not get the item, if not its yours. No stress, no drama, no third party bidding cloud clusters, no armies of PCs watching for a bid to be placed, no worries. The extent people will go through to buy something they really don't need baffles me. I was looking at a used car, one I have wanted for a LONNNNNG time. The owner had a price that was above mine. I started out with the max number I was willing to pay. For whatever reason he thought that was my starting point, and started to act like an auctioneer. He actually got pissed when I said I was leaving. After typing that I'm not sure where I was going with that but........

There are no "tricks" in an auction that will give you some special advantage over everyone else or guarantee that no one will beat your offer. Bid the highest price you are willing to pay and hope no one wants it more than you.

Some people claim waiting till the very end is a good strategy. The only way it might help is that it gives other bidders less time to think about if they want to outbid you or not. If anything, I believe it just pushes the price higher because people freak out when they see the price rapidly rising and respond by making panic bids well beyond what they originally planned.

But if it makes you feel good, do it. Head games aside, if someone is willing to pay more than you, you're out no matter when you actually place your bid.

"Bid sniping" programs automate the process, but chances are others are using them too. At some point everyone is maxed out and a top bidder emerges.

Good luck!

I agree. Pick your price and bid that. I know you curse when someone gets it for just a few $$ more than your max bid. But how do you know their max bid isn't some ridiculous amount?

Just bid and wait. One thing if there are multiple of the item up for bid, bid on the one(s) closest to ending first. Then you don't have to wait as long to bid on another one if you don't win.

Don't bid on more than one at a time. If you do, you'll win both of them. That is Murphy's law.

For something like phones, there is always another one.

I would highly recommend _against_ placing a high bid using ebays system. This only serves to increase the selling price of the item (bad for for the buyer) and allows others to out bid you by a low amount (equivalent to to someone on the Price is Right bidding $1 more and shutting a person out).

If you bid $100 on an item that is currently selling for $10 then the bid becomes something like $11. You've just increased the price. I can now come along and bid $1 more, $1 more, $1 more, etc. to see if I can beat your bid. All the while the price to you increases. Perhaps I give up at $50. Well, now I simply ran _your_ cost up. I could keep going until I hit your amount and add $1.

My recommendation is to us a snipe bid. I use »www.gixen.com/

Now you do as others have said and put in your highest bid. Now everyone is on a level playing field and the highest bid wins. No one gets to edge you out by bidding up your price to see if they can beat you by $1. It also helps weed out those idiots who just want to see if they can get that $500 items for $100 and accomplish nothing but running the price up. The only down fall to a snipe bid is if, seeing that someone outbid you, you'd change your mind and go even higher then your top bid. But if this happened, then you are just being indecisive.

I certainly agree with tcope, using a sniper is the best way to get what you want in a reasonable price. I use »www.justsnipe.com/auctio ··· gnin.asp which is free and very effective.

Of course you can always do what the earlier poster mentioned and is soon as you see an item you want put in the most you want to spend for it. In some cases this technique also works but you normally end up spending more for an item than you would if you used a sniper. Putting in an early bid encourages other 2 bit over what they see on the screen thus raising the price.

Things to know:

1. Your limit is your limit. Bid sniping does not change that.
2. Tons of other people use bid sniping too. When everyone does it, no one has an advantage.

Personally, I only participate in auctions when the item is rare/unusual/collectible. For phones, electronics, every day stuff, I am not going to play bidding games over a common item I can find anywhere. I just want to know the price up front, make a decision, and get it over with. I'll bet when the auction for the OP's phone is over, the closing price will not be too far off than what you could "Buy It Now" for anyway. So what's the point?

It's true that no one snip bidding has an advantage but snip bidding levels the playing field for bidders.

There are many reason's to bid on items. Last thing I bought was a portable sound system. I could afford to wait and there are a lot of them on ebay. So I just put a bunch of snip bids in the same group (so when I won, all others were deleted) and made them all fairly low. If you can play the waiting game there is a good chance if a good deal. Perhaps one sold just a few minutes before or perhaps the closing of the the item was at a weird time. I've seen items sell for $300 all day long and then all of a sudden one sells for $200.

Why bid on an auction at all? Auctions are intended to get the most amount of money for the seller. They only makes sense for a buyer when it is a very rare item.

But sometimes you get lucky and the seller starts the bidding low on an item no one else wants. I just bought a network enabled rack mounted power switcher for $30 because no one else bid on it.

The intent of a seller is always to make the most amount of money... this does not automatically mean that this will happen. In that an item is being auction does, in no way, mean the price will be higher then average. A few months ago I bought a router that was selling each and every day for $60. I got it for $30.

that makes almost no sense at all

bid your max

always

if you end up with a great deal, fantastic!

if you end up paying your max, well that's what the item was worth to you anways, so congrats! you paid what you thought the item was worth

get outbid? whether it's at the last second, or 4 days before end of auction, it makes no difference, it went for more than you were willing to pay

i mean, I guess you can snipe bid your max amount right at the end, along with everyone else, and you can see exactly the same scenario play out in the last minute

but it doesn't really get you anything

It does make sense. If I person is snip bidding they have no advantage as they simply enter the max they will pay and walk away. They will either get it for up to their amount or they won't. There is no magical way that snip bidding will give any advantage over anyone else buying the item. Who ever bids the most, wins. However, what snip bidding _does_ do is eliminates someone from bidding up an item and then also bidding it up to $.50 or $1 more then someone else bidding using ebays system. So no one knows a snip bidders bid until it's too late to out bid them by $.50. Hence, it levels the playing field.

It has nothing to do with bidding the max... I agree with that 100%. It stops ebay bidders from _not_ bidding their max and only working to out bid you by $.50.

Example: You bid your max of $10.00 using ebay. I come along and bid $8.00, then $8.50, then $9.00, $9.50, $10.00 and finally $10.50. I've just screwed you over because I could "see" your max bid and just capped you by $.50. If you used a snip bid and your max of $10.00 then I would have tried to low ball the seller and put an ebay bid in for $8.00. Now... because you are using a snip bid ebay's system does not drive the price up. It leaves it at $8.50. 10 seconds before the auction is over, your snip bid kicks in and you get it for $8.50. The sellers did not drive the price up for the buyer.

Now I'm not saying that it always works like this. Other people are sniping as well. Also, if an item is worth $10.00, it tends to sell for $10.00 but using a snip bid can yield good results.

What I do is basically know the max I will pay for something, and then "watch" the bid, and then at some point before it ends, place that bid. So I guess that gixen site does that for you at the last second, I just do it manually. Of course sometimes I've forgotten about it and missed it, so an automatic way like you mentioned could be better.

I do that too but because I am so indecisive. I will see something I want but it might be cheaper somewhere else or I might not need it as much as I thought.

You ask, How to bid on eBay and win?

There is a proven way to do this that works absolutely every time.
You simply bid more than anyone else does.

Since you did not state any other criteria regarding bid placing, only to BID and WIN, you need to bid higher than anyone else does.

You can do this at anytime during the auction, it does not matter. You can place your bid when the auction opens, on day three or in the last seconds. If you bid more than everyone else then you WILL win.

I place my max bid for the item about 60-90 seconds before the auction ends. If I win great if not I do it again on a similar item until I get what I want.

What you are leaving out is that many if not most other bidders use bid sniping too. So if everyone is doing it, what is the advantage?

If it "levels the playing field," then there is no advantage. It just makes you equal. We are back to the simple principle of highest price wins. Everyone's gimmicks and tricks cancel each other out. It's a zero sum game.

You may have an advantage over the few buyers who do not use bid sniping, but for all the rest it just accelerates the pissing match until ultimately only one is left standing.

I think you are still missing the point which I just explained.

Level the playing field does mean that there are no longer any advantages. Yes, it means everything is equal.

I never denied that the highest bid wins (as that should be obvious). That has _nothing_ to do with my post.

I thought I was clear that using a snip bid does not allow someone to manually "bid up" and only bid enough to beat the highest bid by a nominal amount.

I guess what I'm getting at, that you're missing, is that sniping doesn't really make a difference

i can manually bid 10x until i'm 50 cents over your max, or I can make a big max bid that's 100 dollars over you, and i'll still win it for 50 cents more than you bid

or if your max bid is higher than mine, whether I snipe, or creep up, or bid once, you win

the only thing that I can think that snipe maybe does, is not attract attention to an item that you secretly covet, that you hope no one else has their eye on....

It's just as you mentioned. I'll give you an example of how it's different (though, I think I already did this).

If I want the item for $100 and place this on ebay you can keep bidding until you beat me by 50 cents. In that case I got screwed. If I used a snipe bid of $100 then you'd never know my max bid until it was too late to beat me just by 50 cents. The max someone will pay stays the same but the difference is in using a snipe bid one person cannot screw over another by simply out bidding them by a few cents.

If they still have that 'buy it now' button, just click that.

**its been like 10 years since I was on ebuy last and they used to have that button. Just depends on how much you want to pay.

I'm with you. Just buy it. If I was to walk into a store to buy something and the clerk wanted to play some kind of game with me before I could get what I was looking for, I'd just walk out. I really don't want to put any time or effort into buying something. That just feels like I'm a dog and I have to do some kind of trick to get my biscuit.

Seriously, auctions don't make any sense unless the market value of the item is not known - such as for rare, antique, or art objects. I notice that Ebay auction items which are generally available in the marketplace end up selling for the same or slightly more than they would cost otherwise.

I just bought a sound system that usually goes for $300 on ebay for $250 on ebay. I bought several cans of Megs M16 wax for $2.50 each when they sell for $25 on most websites. The list goes on.

Auctions make perfect sense.

I'm sure auctions make sense for you, and I'm grad for that. But for me they're fundamentally difficult because I'm not really a gamer. Anything beyond me giving the money in return for the goods just makes me feel used. That's just me though.

I'm also thinking that perhaps you just happen to buy different things from me. After your last post about how well it worked for you, I spend some hours looking for things which I needed. Every single thing on Ebay was more expensive than retail. I guess I'm just a loser at that game, because I just lost two hours without any gain for me. Perhaps it takes more luck.

$2.50 for a $25.00 item? Who wouldn't buy a stolen item for that kind of a discount.

Please explain how being willing to pay more for an item at an auction is screwing someone? Is not the very essence of an auction to find out how much a person is willing to pay for an item?

There was some discussion about the product. It appeared that the seller (Karen) had bought a pallet of the stuff in a a storage container bid and did not know what the stuff really sold for. After a week or so she increased the price a little. Still not close to the selling price any place else.

Outbidding? No. But purposely outbidding someone by 1 cent or 50 cents because you know what they bid? Yes. That person is no longer "bidding the max that they would pay". They are only needing to outbid you by 1 cent because they know _you_ max. _That_ is the difference. With a snipe bid you _hide_ your max bid to the bidding field is level.

That doesn't make any sense at all. If you're over my max bid it doesn't matter if it's a few cents or dollars you win. If you put in a wildly huge bid ebay chokes it down to just big enough to win anyways