Be a Sniper

Do you bid on items at eBay? Have you had the frustrating experience of having the highest bid right up to the last second, only to have someone to outbid you — and you have no time to respond?

Chances are that you lost out to an “auction sniper” — someone using the strategy of making a winning bid at the last possible second. This strategy works particularly well with eBay, where the auctions end at a well-defined time that isn’t changed.

When I first started bidding for items on eBay, this happened to me quite often, until (being slow on the uptake) it finally dawned on me that this wasn’t some bad luck on my part, but an actual strategy others were pursuing. So I started sniping myself, without knowing that this was a strategy with a name and a broad following. And it worked — I started winning more and more auctions, until finally it got to the point where the only time I was losing was when the price was higher than I wanted to pay, or when I got sniped by someone bidding even closer to the auction’s close than I was.

This observation (those really closely bids) got me to wondering if some bidders were using software to do their bidding at precisely the right moment. I could easily imagine how to write such software. So I started googling…and discovered the term “auction sniping” and the wide, wide world of sniping software. There are sniping programs you can buy (some of them quite expensive!), and web sites that will do your sniping for you (for a fee, of course). Being the open source software geek that I am, I wondered if someone might have made a free, open source sniping program — and indeed they have. JBidWatcher is exactly such a program. Best of all — like a lot of open source software — it is a really well-written piece of software, and well-supported. Several magazine reviews called it the best sniper out there.

I also ran into some serious academic papers studying sniping (and validating it as a winning strategy). One of the paper’s authors put it this way:

"Our analysis explicitly shows that the winning strategy is to bid at the last moment as the first attempt rather than incremental bidding from the start."

There’s a good article about the academic studies here, and the papers themselves are here, here, here, and here (all are PDFs; you’ll need the free Adobe Acrobat Reader, which is most likely already installed on your computer, to view them).

So after getting all educated about bidding strategies and sniping software, I downloaded JBidWatcher a couple of weeks ago and started using it for my eBay bidding. It’s got a solid “two thumbs up!” rating from me — I haven’t run into a single flaw, and so far I’ve managed to win every bid I’ve made using it. My favorite feature — which I believe is unique to JBidWatcher — is “multisniping”. This lets you set up an automatic sniping bid on multiple auctions of the same item, even where you only want one of them. JBidWatcher will snipe one after the other until either you win one, or you lost them all. Just last night I won a multisnipe auction, where I lost the first auction but won the second one. These two auctions closed just one minute apart in the middle of my night; I’d never have won either of them without JBidWatcher doing the work for me while I was asleep.

Don’t bid on eBay without it!