Greetings you crazy Pharties! ]:)
It should come to no surprise to the regulars that I agree completely with the Original Poster - Chris.
I have read many of your replies until I couldn't take it anymore, and it appears to this old codger that many of you tripped and fell squarely upon the tracks while trying to hop the Common Sense Train! ROFL
For sellers giving advice to sellers, and for a group of people who regularly wax fondly about the "good ol' days" when auctions were auctions, your arguments are self-defeating.
Firstly... Sniping is a GAME... It is a game which turns the concept of a winning highest bid into a winning lowest bid.
You can say "It's been proven statistically that things can be bought cheaper via the practice of sniping", and this may in fact be true, but it conceptually RUINS the auction process, and one should not wonder for long why so many sell do BIN....yet ebay still promotes and encourages auction-style listings regularly. Why? Because people are steering away from auction-style listings because of sniping.... (read: your cheapskate attempts to steal my items!).
For a seller to promote sniping and then yearn for the good ol' days is like taking a child into a porn shop every week and then wondering where the child's morals went to.
JUST BECAUSE 3 people get into a sniping battle at the end of a sale, (thus your auction ends on a higher note than 5 minutes prior to the sniping frenzy), DOES NOT support the notion sniping is beneficial to anyone beyond the winning sniper. Not only that... it specifically benefits snipers with the fastest internet connection.
The entire act of "waiting until the last minute" is an act that leads to many people being left out of the bidding process, simply because they "forgot" to log in during the last few seconds of a 5, 7 , 10, or 30 DAY sale. This fact, in fact, makes buyers look stupid also, particularly when they contact the seller to relist because they "forgot"...or fell asleep, or had company arrive, or got in a fight with the wife, or had to go to the bathroom. Hell..they only forgot for 2 minutes... but since they jumped onto the commonly accepted notion of "waiting until the last minute" they jeopardize positive results for everyone including themselves.
If you, the seller, were not at the mercy of this practice of cheapskates, (whether that title includes you or not) you would make more money, perhaps save money on relisting--- and perhaps you could afford to spend a little more on an auction....then perhaps you could enjoy the "good ol' days" again.
All ebay would need to do to resolve this would be to set the system up so a buyer had to insert a "captcha" number in order to place a bid..effectively destroying all high-speed sniping services and last-second bids. You could still see a bidding rush during the last few minutes, such would be reasonable and within expectations.
In short, the practice of sniping remains to be a corruption of the concept of auctioning for anyone who is accustomed to real-life auctions, and has basically turned it over to those who desire to game the system. When you snipe, you game the system. I honestly believe that everyone would be more successful--- buyers and sellers and ebay... if the extreme end of it were removed.
I remain disturbed to see so many sellers supporting the conceptual hacking of their own limbs. It's bothersome and dizzying to say the least.
As you were.... -gary
