Gixen bid vs. ebay Proxy (auto) bidding

[bipolarkitty]

Hi, although I've found Gixen to be very helpful for items with no bids that end at odd times & low demand items, I've had zero % win rate for in demand items that all seem to be won via ebay Proxy auto-bids. Looking at bid histories, it seems that even if Gixen gets a last bid in for me right before auction end, if someone has previously set a higher ebay auto-bid amount, ebay declares that proxy auto-bid as the winner. I just lost out on 2 auctions due to these auto bids, so I'm wondering if it's better to go that route rather than Gixen for high demand items? Thanks in advance for any input on this.

Lost Auction item #s:
176481369437
156313845745

[Cupid]

As I always say on here, 'On Ebay the highest accepted bid always wins'.

What sniping does is protect you against other users changing their mind about what an item is worth to them, it does not improve your chances of winning anything that others have already decided is worth more to them and have already submitted a bid that reflects that.

My other mantra here is that it's important to do your research up front, so that you can decide, well in advance, what an item is actually worth to you before setting up the snipe, and then feel confident that if it goes for more than your bid that others have paid too much for it.
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Mark

[bipolarkitty]

Thanks for reply. I was just wondering on this, as it almost seems that ebay applies the proxy bid right at auction close, therefore, no one else could possibly bid against it. My Gixen bid was a few seconds before close. I need to look further into how & when their proxy bids are applied. I'm rarely around at auction close, but I was for 1 of these, and I noticed at auction end, ebay posted a message, something like \"Please wait while we determine the winner\" for a few seconds, which I'd never seen before

[Cupid]

Bids are applied by Ebay when they are submitted.

They only ever display the amount of any bid that is required to be winning the auction, and only the full amount of a bid when it is outbid. That's because, most of the time, they are willing to still accept lower bids than that, and to display it would discourage many such bids because it would demonstrate to those other bidders that it was actually pointless for them to enter their maximum bid since all it would do is push the price up and not result in them winning anything.

The way that Ebay process bids is that they first check whether there is already a higher accepted bid, and if there is then the immediate response is that this new bid has been outbid. So, in this sense, it is technically impossible to outbid an earlier bid with a lower later bid and any later bid that is accepted (due to being at least one bid increment more than the current auction price) is technically already outbid before it has even been accepted.

The reason that Ebay puts up the 'determining winner' message for a few seconds after the end of the auction is that they are accepting bids via many different routes right up to the end of that auction... (as an aside, this is why after an auction ends you can occasionally see bids of exactly the same amount have been accepted within the same second even from the same account, even though accepting bids of the same amount from the same account is generally blocked if they are not submitted at the same time via different routes). It's got nothing to do with processing bids that were accepted well before the auction end and all about processing the ones that (may) have just been submitted, possibly some of which wouldn't have even been accepted had they been placed further apart/earlier in the auction... if earlier bids are higher than any later accepted bids, in technical terms they have already won, because no other bid is ever determined to be leading the auction unless it is for a higher amount.

In this respect you're thinking about this the wrong way round. It's never about having your bid be processed so late that an earlier higher bid can't outbid it, that's impossible because it's always up to your bid to be higher than any bid that's already been placed earlier than it, otherwise the actual processing of your bid by Ebay dictates that it's never even considered to be 'winning' at all.

The fact remains that the highest accepted bid always wins, it's not about the timing in that respect, in fact if your bid is the same as another high bid, it's the first to be accepted that is determined to be the winner by Ebay.

This is one of the reasons why (another being the 'bid increment rule', covered extensively elsewhere), when you know that there are many snipers likely to be interested in a certain auction, it's sometimes an advantage to have your bid placed a little earlier than theirs, just a few seconds earlier though of course, not minutes or hours before since that just encourages others to do more research and provides them with time to think about whether they actually are prepared to pay more than they initially were prepared to do from reading that auction, and in such circumstances it is a disadvantage for you to schedule it as late as could possibly be accepted.
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Mark

[Gixen]