Ebay Killed by Snipers!

A huge amount of automatic sniping services and software is now marketed to eBay users and it's common for sellers not to know if anyone will bid on their item until the very last second. But the rise in sniping appears to have caused a similar fall in low start, no reserve auctions and these, after all, are the potential bargains buyers get excited about.

Over recent years sellers have realised the number of people watching their items is no longer a reliable guide to the nuber of bids that will be made. It's now rare to see an early bid on many items and, when a seller does, it's often just a speculative opening bid from an opportunist - rarely a realistic proxy bid. Sellers also know that the eBay marketplace is now so competitive that most buyers take for granted they will get repeated opportunities to bid on a similar item later which only encourages them to snipe with bids at lower levels.

So all this leads sellers to think low starting prices when using the auction format are too risky. If the flurry of last second bids are all going to be from low ball bargain snipers this would mean a seller can lose a significant amount of their items for less than they originally cost and they've still got the eBay fees to pay too! So sellers are increasingly taking the increased listing fee cost on the chin in order to raise starting bids as a protection measure. At least then they don't pay a final value fee if no serious bidder is found.

Many sellers have gone a stage further and abandoned the auction format altogether, favouring instead the certainty of Buy It Now or Store Inventory Format.

So the end result for buyers is an apparently less competitive choice and many more fixed price offerings. I would argue that neither is a positive turn on for browsing buyers. If these buyers see less potential bargains as they surf the listings will their attention wander more easily? In the UK we usualy have a big game televised at 4pm on a Sunday and that could easily become more interesting for a browser if the shopping is becoming tedious and boring.

So, with all this mind, I'm becoming increasingly a fan of automatic auction extensions. After all this brings online auctions in line with real life auctions. No real life auctioneer stops taking bids, the auction ends when bidders stop making bids. Automatic auction extensions are now operated by a few of the alternative auction websites to eBay. In short the auction closes at a particular time as usual but only if no bid has been made in, say, the past 60 seconds. So just as in real life, the auction ends when the bids stop.

I appreciate this would mean the end of sniping. But if it means sellers become encouraged to risk lower start bids without reserves then isn't this a good thing?

A discussion thread has been started in the Pheebay forums for more comments and opinions on the pros and cons of sniping on eBay.