Snip­ing only works sometimes.

If every­one used ebay the way it’s intended, snip­ing would be use­less. If your max­i­mum is $10 and another person’s is $15 and you both bid your max­i­mums a week in advance, the $15 per­son would win, regard­less of whether you put your bid in one week or fif­teen sec­onds before the auc­tion ended.

How­ever some peo­ple don’t put their high­est bid in first. This is never to their ben­e­fit and some­times works to their detri­ment. It can’t be to their ben­e­fit, because they’re not going to get the item any cheaper just by bid­ding a lower amount. They’ll either lose the item or be forced to bid higher, or win the item at that price — which they would have done even if they’d bid dou­ble the amount.. How­ever if they don’t get in fast enough at the end, with their true high­est bid, they’re going to lose the item to the last per­son who bid suc­cess­fully. That’s the only time snip­ing is worth­while — you might be beat­ing some idiot who didn’t bid their max­i­mum in the first place.

It’s also use­ful in the instance of some­thing look­ing very worth­less but you know it’s actu­ally very valu­able, and you don’t want to give its value away by hav­ing some­one acci­den­tally call you on your $500 bid.

I find online snip­ing ser­vices great how­ever, because you can lump sev­eral of the same item together in one group, and the ser­vice will auto­mat­i­cally snipe one after the other (accord­ing to which ends soon­est) and stop once it wins one — so you’ve got a fin­ger on every item with­out hav­ing actu­ally bid on a dozen dupli­cate items (and risk win­ning all of them). I’ve found that useful.