Here’s a useful guide to always winning at eBay – even when you lose.
Step One:
Find the product you want.
Step Two:
Save the product to your watch list.
Step Three:
Wait.
Step Four:
Just before the item ends, enter the maximum amount you are willing to pay for the item.
Step Five:
Click submit.
From here.
Comments
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.