http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7635424.stm

No such issues with Auctionsniper, you set your limit, you either win it or you lose it, if you win it there is a higher chance than you win it at a lower price than had you entered into a bidding war

This would give them more money and it would stop bid snipping and everyone has a fair chance of winning, plus the seller would benifit….

AGAIN…..Why does everyone thing that the bid placed in the last 10 seconds or so is a sniped bid???????????…I bid this way all the time.
Sensible bidders look on and see what is happening during a auction bid time & when the lower bidders drop out decide to join or not.Thants
human nature….Hopefully.

Everyone already has a fair chance of winning .AUCTIONS run for days & days & days & days

The time could bet set to what they want, but the principle is the same….

This would give them more money and it would stop bid snipping and everyone has a fair chance of winning, plus the seller would benifit….

It might also mean that bids will go on quicker and not left to the last minute, most auctions nowadays dont seem to get bids until the last 5 minutes or so………

They could not even be bothered to answer my email………

Big Fred

At 2/ above
It appears bidnapper DO have bid assist system, only just found it!!.

http://www.bidnapper.com/features.php3?base=contingent

1/ That one reason for NOT extending Auctions to a bid war!.

2/ Agreed, but a sniping service will not offer a ‘bid till won’ service.

3/ Thankful, even a sniping bid & highest bid, does not show the amount a buyer is prepared to bid to. I will agree this extention idea is agold mine for shill bidders.

# 43

To my knowledge of the sniping service I use, I have used this service for about 3 years (as above) & they do not send any emails confirming the bid was a sniped bid. & never received or sent an email. Matter of fact, can they send an email to the sellers as they would not know thier email address, unless it’s via the ebay messaging system.

Slowly as people get used to bidding, they learn to bid late, just before the auction ends. More & more I see very last (30 seconds) bids & an item can take off.

# 44

Fingers crossed not happened to me ‘yet’, but like anything on the www. it inly needs a clever sod to find a way in, and all personnal stuff gets thrwon everywhere. Ebay’s system gets hacked all the time, well their members ID & passwords do, we are contantly using ‘report spam’ to ebay & paypal, although it does seem not so much lately (fingers crossed again).

Back in 2003 I had signed up for one of the sniping services as a backup in case my computer wasn’t running at the time of an auction ending. That service got hacked to the point that the hackers had my name and email address (no telling what else). I received an email with a virus attached addressed to me by name claiming to be from the sniping service. It does happen and that is the risk that eBay has forced on all of us that want to use these kinds of services.

I haven’t had one for a while, so perhaps the snipe site has stopped doing that?

I would love people to bid earlier, if only so that I get a buzz too out of watching to see if it will go up. But in the end, if it sells that is all that counts. I don’t do 99p auctions, I set my prices at a level that I will be happy to get, so it is down to the market to decide how much they want to pay above that.

1) For buyers who bid on many items, it would be a huge frustration to have to stay with each auction for an undetermined extra amount of time before knowing if you won.

2) If you are bidding on multiple of the same item, wanting to win only one, how would you know which auction to bid on? One auction that was originally ending before another may be extended beyond the second auction’s end time, forcing you to decide whether to bid on the second auction and potentially win two of the same item. This is a big plus to fixed end times: knowing for sure whether you won the item or lost and need to move on to another auction.

3) This is the worst of any con I can think of, yet no one has mentioned it: Extending auctions would vastly help shill bidders. Bid sniping is actually a huge weapon against shill bidders, because they don’t have time to respond to your bid. Extending an auction would allow shill bidders to bid up the auction to your maximum bid price. It would also encourage shill bidders to outbid buyers they perceive as overeager in an attempt to artificially create a bidding war. I would see this as a field day for shill bidders.

Ultimately, I think a lot of buyers would lose confidence in the system in light of the above flaws. The main advantage to such a system is that it would allow fickle buyers who don’t initially place their absolute highest bid to continue bidding past the end time. This may provide sellers more money, but on the other hand, in my experience, those fickle buyers tend to bid up an auction price long before the end time anyway. And with the number of buyers lost due to lack of confidence in the system, would the seller actually get more in the end? The more bidders you get involved, the higher the end price, in my experience, so losing disillusioned bidders could be a major negative.

Some examples were given above of sellers who have used this system outside of eBay on personal websites and had success. The problem with this comparison is that those sellers have already established a committed, trusting following on eBay, so there is very little risk of losing bidders over trust issues. By nature, if a bidder is willing to bid through a personal website, they must trust the seller somewhat, whereas a huge reason many bidders choose eBay is because they trust the system, not the seller. By changing the system in a way that could cause those buyers to lose confidence in the system they trust, you are undermining a huge component to the success of eBay auctions.

That said, I do think this idea could work in certain categories, such as collectibles. But I definitely think, if it were ever implemented, that it should be the seller’s choice which option to use. EBay would also have to become even more diligent at monitoring for potential shill bidding, something which may not be cost-effective for them.

When you look at the current system, there really are very few scenarios in which an automatic extension of an auction’s end time would be preferable to any of the current selling options. The Best Offer feature allows sellers to try to negotiate with prospective buyers to the maximum price anyone is willing to pay, so sellers who fear an auction would undersell can choose this option. The only scenario I can think of that would benefit from an extended auction format is rare collectibles that are difficult to appraise, making it difficult to establish the ballpark price range needed to use Best Offer. So, it seems unlikely that eBay would establish a major new feature for such a small segment of its community.

Ultimately, I’m not sure this change would be beneficial to the eBay marketplace. It would provide only moderate advantages at the cost of potentially disastrous pitfalls. While it may add excitement to some casual bidders, it would undermine many other buyers’ confidence in the process and perhaps worst of all, introduce inconveniences that would annoy many more.