Quote:
Originally Posted by rwperu34
One more thing to add to the "con" side of the ledger here. One of the tradeoffs here will be less sniping, but more shilling. That is a bad tradeoff, IMO. A snipe is an honest bid with intent to pay. A shill is a dishonest bid with no intent to pay.
I'd also expect more buyers remorse from this system, as the reason for adding the two minutes is so people will bid with emotion and go over the max they are comfortable with.
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Exactly. That article mentions sniping and shilling in the same sentence as if they’re equally controversial. They’re absolutely not. Shilling is fraudulent, actually outlawed in many places, and is against eBay policy.
Sniping is just normal bid strategy and an expected facet of auctions and no one should have a problem with it. I don’t even use any snipe programs or anything, I just enter my bid at the last second manually, as pretty much a lot of people do, and if I win, I win. If another bid was higher in that second then I didn’t…who cares when it was placed.
If someone “sniped” me at the last second (whatever that even means, as all the bids kinda just go in at the same time during that last second), and I was outbid by that, I shouldn’t be mad at that…I have no one to blame but myself because my bid wasn’t high enough.
If some buyers think sniping is bad…actually hard ending time auctions with the associated sniping is overall beneficial for the buyer, and discourages prolonged bidding wars. Also if an auction takes an hour to end, or most of a night to end, the result is simply more eyes on it, whereas with hard ending times people often just miss it in that narrow ending window, even with it on their watch list (I’ve let quite a few slip by that way as a buyer, oh well). So I guess we’ll just see higher prices on a lot of auctions if they do this.