No bids = no snipe

[spoonpilot]

Hi,

I buy a lot of one off/unique items on ebay for resale and more often than not I have far more in my watch list than I can afford to buy and I therefore need to prioritise which items I will purchase in any given week/month.

It would be very useful to me if gixen had a feature that enabled me to place a snipe ONLY if the item already had a bid on it. This way I would not have to commit to buying something now that I could maybe purchase the next time the seller listed the item (and I could more afford it).

I currently have to place a snipe on an item with no bids, as if the item does receive a late bid or snipe I will lose out on an item I will likely never see again. Often however, I end up being the only bidder - so technically I could have left it another week or two.

I know this issue may not be of use to the majority of people but I am sure it would be useful in budgeting to at least some. I hope if it is not to technically complicated, it may one day find itself on Gixen's features list.

I have been a gixen subscriber since 2007. It was a useful convenience at first, but now I honestly don't think I could run my business without it. Great stuff Mario, many thanks!

[Cupid]

I understand your request, it has been discussed previously here:

http://www.gixen.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2674

It would work fine for those items with low demand, low availability but occasional high value... it would make no difference to cases where there is high demand and high value as these always attract some early bids.

Where I think it would not work well is where there is low availability, high demand but a well established value and that is because, more often than not, that attracts other snipers, so all you will get is late bids and there simply isn't time to detect a late bid and still have time to submit your bid to ebay as a reaction, even when that detection is automatic.

In my experience it is impossible to know for sure that an item will not only attract snipers, this is because there is now such a wide constituency of potential buyers aware of ebay as a buying opportunity, of how it works and the possibility of gaining an advantage through sniping.

So implementing your suggestion would lead to a greater loss rate on items where sniping is more prevalent, which again in my experience more than cancels out the saving you may make if and when the seller decides to re-list such items that are not sold, this is because the items that are sold the first time they are listed, even to a sniper are more attractive than those that appear again... my experience is that if an item attracts no bids the first time it is listed at a certain price it is 99% certain not to attract any bids the second and subsequent times also, which is an indication that the price is too high for the market not that I should wait longer to decide whether or not to buy it.
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Mark