First Impressions

[PMW]

I just wanted to take a minute to verbalize the impression I have of this service...:

Great Job. I do not know what else to say. You allowed me to purchase a very rare artifact that drew NO ATTENTION simply because I was not in the race until the last few seconds. I purchased an item for $0.99 (yes...99 cents) that was easily worth 100 times more. Your $6 fee for mirror service (which I purchased) was petty for the service you provide.

I think, personally, that you are shorting yourself with respect to the service that you easily provide. I think $10 would still be cheap for it and it would raise income in that division by 66%. I am not a tax attorney or CPA that would assume to re-evaluate your business plan; I am a Mechanical Engineer with a minor in Computer Science that appreciates the personal ability that you can issue average people for a unrealistically low fee.

I commend you and appreciate the effort you apply as well as financial resources you all are committing.

I DO HAVE ONE QUESTION :

How is my eBay password protected? I have signed up for the mirror service, as stated above, so that my purchase fires everything from two locations 6 seconds before auction end. I am not even online, so I am not signed into eBay when the transactions take place. That means that you are storing my information offsite (from me) in your system so that you can not only issue the bid, but in order to do so you are also signing in for me.

I need to understand how I am protected in this regard because I feel like I have just lowered my guard and allowed myself to be compromised.

I am fully satisfied with your service; I just need to understand your security measures that are protecting my private (which renders me vulnerable) information. Thank you for your attention.

[mario]

Thank you PMW.

Pricing - as I mentioned already many times before, the current price for mirror was more of my "gut feeling" than result of any serious business analysis. I doubt that any "professional" would do a better job however. My main objective has always been growth, and long-term it turned out wise not to be greedy. I believe a few months ago, based on available statistics online, Gixen seems to have become the largest sniping service. It took 6 years.

To answer your other question. Gixen stores passwords encrypted, with a reversible encryption of some kind, details of which I don't want to share for obvious reasons. There is a number of monitoring services that would alert me immediately if there was a breach. It hasn't ever happened.

In addition, your password is deleted from the system 48 hours after your last auction ends, and only a one-way hash of it is stored to make future logins faster (instead of verifying your password with ebay each time).