Sniping can result in more money for sellers

[mfischer7777]

I am new to Gixen (I had previously used eBay Countdown Beta which was very successful for me in the past, but I had not been buying anything for sometime now and discovered eBay had discontinued support for it) and I decided to try and find a new laptop (my harddrive died on my Compaq 17" machine ($155 to repair it) and I've been using a little Netbook as a backup). I got shut out trying to bid manually at the last few seconds a couple times and so I began looking for replacement software or service and after comparing the other pay services it seemed like choosing Gixen was a "No Brainer"! I recently completed my first snipe attempt with the following results: I was bidding on an HP dv7 17" AMD Quad Core machine (for which the repair shop wanted $600 for one they had) and I also found another one for sale online for $389 including shipping so I set that as my target value not to exceed. The machine I was bidding for had a cracked screen (but still worked fine according to the seller). I found a screen online for $73 and deducted that from $389 and set my bid at $316.51 (the seller said he had a quote from a local supplier to replace the screen for $39 so I hoped I would be able to convince the seller to replace it and add the $39 + tax to my bid if I were the successful bidder and save a few bucks that way, but I was not going to bid more than I could buy an equivalent machine for that did not have the defect). At the time I entered my bid in Gixen with 6 secs Main and 3 secs backup, the current auction price was at $158, so I was bidding double what the price was at that time. The winning bidder entered right after that posting four tiered bids at $170, $190, $200 and $321.51+ which was the winning bid (he simply was willing to pay more for it than I was). Four other bidders entered the bidding in the final minute 40 seconds. The next to the last bid before mine was for $251.40 and was posted at the same time mine was posted (5 secs before close) so if I had not attempted the snipe at $316.51, the seller would have only gotten $251.40+$2.50=$253.90 or $67.61 less from the winning bidder. I hope this report is helpful and I think makes a case for sniping being good for sellers as well when bidders know the true value of something and bid accordingly. I was pleased to see that even with choosing tight bidding offsets for my main and backup bids that it got through - kudos to Gixen.

[Cupid]

I think one of the reasons that sniping is tolerated (even encouraged to a certain extent, though not via external services) by Ebay, is that they recognise that the more bids that they accept on auctions the higher the prices achieved and hence the more money that eBay makes, as well as the sellers... those sellers are thus additionally encouraged to list more of their goods on Ebay and complete a virtuous circle.
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Mark