Attention ebay users...MUST READ

“My buddy at work collects military radios and does alot of buying on ebay. He told me about a cool low cost service called "auctionsniper". Its a service that allows you to enter a max bid and a time at which your bid is to be placed. For example 5 seconds prior to the bid closing.This allows you to not help jack up the price in a bidding war and end up paying more then is necessary. Its very cheap to use. Check out www.auctionsniper.com

I just "won" a really nice set of stock aluminum rims for my jeep. I got a set of 4 for $96 plus shipping. They are like $70 plus each new. I used auctionsniper for them it was cool. BTW the first three uses are free...”

“I have forwarded this information to ebay.”

“I don't think ebay can do anything about it. I know esnipe.com has been around for a long time, it's a similar service as to what birch described.

eBay probably doesn't even care.

A slick feature of esnipe is they now let you set up item groups. Say ferinstance there were three or four identical items up for auction. You can set it up so that esnipe will bid for you on the items and quit bidding if you win one of them.

ebay is already such a great example of an Imperfect Market that services like these merely add to the mix a bit for a fantastic real-life Econ case study. :)

But if someone wants to dig up something in eBay's TOS which disallows proxy bidding, I'd be curious to see such.

Personally, I don't do much ebay'ing as most of the things I tend to be interested in I either want to see first-hand, are cheaper elsewhere, or go for WAY more money than I'm willing to mail off to a complete stranger. :) But here and there I find stuff and use esnipe so I don't have to waste a bunch of time following ten different auctions for a $20 item.”

“You are correct. Ebay does not care.”

“That's a great service. I've used it several times. Make sure that you enter the right bid amount though. I once won something and paid waaaayyyy more than I wanted to for the item.


Your right bacpac, ebay could care less.”

“I have 4 steel jeep rims that I would have dumped off on you for 80 bones + s&h”