What would be the best way to dominate the eBay market as a buyer, if you had all of the eBay tools possible at your disposal? It would be to keep your bid secret, while you knew what everyone else’s bid was. It would combine the best of sealed bid auctions, which are good for the seller, and eBay’s current public bid model, which is good for the buyer.
Secret bids are the best strategy
Think about it for a moment. If the buyer didn’t know how much an item was currently priced, she’d quite possibly overbid. Sellers would love it, eBay would squawk, and someone else would swoop into the market with a public bidding model like eBay’s. It would also make terrible economic sense because buyers have too much information nowadays for a sealed bid format to sustain itself.
(Auction theory 101: The sealed bid strategy doesn’t work in the eBay market, but it can work in niches where there is less information available. My favorite example of this is a few decades ago, when friendly rivals Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson both placed sealed bids on the Beatles’ publishing rights. Michael Jackson bid way, way more than McCartney. They stopped being friendly rivals after that. They stopped being friends altogether.)
How can you keep a bid secret and control the eBay market?
The sharpest arrow in your eBay tools quiver is the ability to keep your bid secret while others are forced to place their bids in public. The only way to do this, of course, is the way of the auction sniper: “e snipe” your bid, which means to place it in the closing seconds of the auction. (Auction jargon in the eBay market terms placing eBay bids within the last minute of the auction “sniping”.)
Auction sniping has a massive advantage besides secrecy. It lets you change your mind, a luxury eBay doesn’t really give you (they correctly point out in their documentation that a bid is a binding contract, a point they do not take lightly). Deferring your bid until the auction’s end means you really aren’t committing until that moment.
What are the risks of keeping a bid secret?
eBay market boffins regard auction sniping as the only true way to get a technical edge on the bidding process. It poses some (surmountable) risks. Let’s take a look at them.
- You could forget to place your bid when the time comes. Whoa, that one can hurt.
- Your internet connection could fail around the time you need to connect to eBay
- Some kind of software update could be hogging the internet connection
- A program might have a dialog open, blocking all activity on your machine
- It might be in the middle of the night when you’re supposed to be sleeping
- It could be happening in the business day when you’re at work and not, shockingly enough, supposed to be buying tchochkes to support to support your expensive vintage chemistry set hobby
How do you overcome the risks of keeping a bid secret?
There are several services online that will do your “e snipe” for you. You join, create a user account, hand over your eBay credentials (ouch! but it’s necessary), then just paste in the item number and maximum price you’re willing to pay. They have rows and rows of speedy dedicated servers, placed in vast underground bunkers just a few hops away from eBay, possibly manned by critters that look like the goblins that run Gringott’s in the Harry Potter movies, grimly studying their pocket watches as they time the bid precisely to execute exactly 6 seconds before the auction ends, bringing you to triumph and glory in the vintage chemistry set collector world, gloating but polititely feigning indifference on the vintage chemistry set message boards.
Okay, I’m not really sure if that’s how it works, but that’s how I like to imagine the esnipe crews doing their thing.
An Auction Sniping Service Can Overcome Those Risks
So what makes the “e snipe” world smarter and better than you? Nothing, but all they do is place bids. They aren’t surfing the net, watching porn, or trying to figure out system updates whilst in the middle of a last-minute auction snipe. They have people and hardware devoted simply to sniping bids, and aren’t subject to the whims of local ISPs sharing connections across a whole neighbhorhood, which is what your ISP does.
I suppose the main risk is that somehow the auction sniper services lose their internet connection, but that kind of thing is vanishingly rare in my experience. That, and I like my sleep–which the auction snipers don’t seem to worry about.