Extend the auction by three minutes when a bid is placed with in the last 3 minutes. Seller Plus

[eagle7918]

 Everyone after dealing with a European counterpart of Ebay for awhile, it seems such a great idea for the seller. It really does promote the auction enviroment and will get rid of all the snipers. I have placed my highest bid before at the end and then missed it by 5 cents, that is crazy. If I had 3 minutes to think about it I could have bid again and again until I decided to give up or  they do. That seller may have made another $100 or so.  All the sniping sites now are competeing with each other and on a hot item, the buyer waiting till the last 10 seconds to place a bid will sometimes get shut out, because of to much traffic. I can't believe Ebay hasn't thought of doing this to aid the seller in getting the most they can, evetrybody wins on this the seller, Ebay, and the person that really wants this item has a chance to get it.  I had a buyer tell me if he really wants something he just places a ridiculous bid and if it goes to high he claims he just made a mistake and does not honor his bid.  This would elimitatre all these problems. What does everyone else think. 

[prescott4]

I think it would cause more unpaid items from folks who get in bidding wars

[the*dog*ate*my*tablecloth]

There's nothing wrong with snipers. High bid wins. Why should we change a perfectly functional system to benefit those who are unwilling to learn how to bid properly? It's not MY job to tell a competing bidder what the item is worth. People who cheap out and bid too low do not deserve another chance. 

Nobody ever gets shut out because of too much traffic on Ebay. There are arrays of mirrored servers.

Once an item keeps extending then the bidders are tied up and cannot bid on YOUR items. Plus if they end up overbidding they use up all their money and have none left for YOUR item. Sellers who suggest this are rubbing their hands in glee at all the extra money they will get but forget that they may be seller number 2. Even if they're seller number 1 the buyer who overbid is more likely to suffer buyer's remorse and back out or neg the seller.

[the*dog*ate*my*tablecloth]

BTW Game Theory would tell us that auction extensions encourage bidders to bid less as they will always have a chance to rebid. Until they have to stop bidding to go to the bathroom or forget to return near the end of the listing.

Ebay never leaves money on the table. IF they thought AE would raise their fees they would have implemented it 15 years ago.

[d-k_treasures]

Would you set your alarm for 3 AM to wake up and bid because an auction is ending at that time?

[mistwomandancing]

Naw...  anyone stupid enough to NOT bid that last 5¢ it would have taken to put in the winning amount deserves to lose, as the saying goes. 

But you have to be smart enough to know how best to bid on this kind of an auction.  Knowing this is a timed auction encourages intelligent bidders to bid their absolute MAX bid for their best chance to win the item they're wanting.   They don't need to know what anyone else bids to know whether to bid *more*...  They just DO bid more, up to their MAX, and that's how they often win!  And they know if that full bid amount isn't even needed for the win, any excess not needed beyond that *one increment increase* amount will be forgiven them, so they have nothing to lose by bidding their absolute best, and everything to (hopefully) win! 

[a_c_green]

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@eagle7918 wrote:

 Everyone after dealing with a European counterpart of Ebay for awhile, it seems such a great idea for the seller. It really does promote the auction enviroment and will get rid of all the snipers.  

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Why would you want to get rid of all the snipers?

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@eagle7918 wrote:

I have placed my highest bid before at the end and then missed it by 5 cents, that is crazy. If I had 3 minutes to think about it I could have bid again and again until I decided to give up or  they do. That seller may have made another $100 or so.  

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If that's your line of thinking, then your "highest" bid really wasn't. If you're remorseful about the bid that you didn't make, then the one that you did make was not your best.

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@eagle7918 wrote:

All the sniping sites now are competing with each other and on a hot item, the buyer waiting till the last 10 seconds to place a bid will sometimes get shut out, because of too much traffic. 

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No way. The eBay system is supporting millions of transactions per second. If you're shut out, it's more likely due to Internet traffic in general adding a crucial second or two of delay in reaching the site, and you may want to snipe a couple of seconds earlier to account for that.

Let me trot out something here that I originally wrote on this topic a few years back, as this idea of auction extensions comes up here on a semi-regular basis: 

The infinite-extensions strategy fails as soon as some bright prankster hacker comes up with a script that will automatically pop in another bid in any auction that is about to end, thus putting it off for another 30 seconds, or 2 minutes, or 2 hours, or 2 weeks; it simply won't matter what the extension interval is, because it will never end. Just for yucks, two accounts can slow-bid against each other: one process waits until the auction is almost over, then pops in a nibble bid. That signals the other process to wait until the auction is almost over, then pop in a nibble counterbid. They won't care what the price reaches, because the auction will never actually end. Colleges will form bidding teams, awarding points to whomever can string out an auction the longest without a seller getting fed up and ending it manually. Some graduating senior will brag about the Precious Moments™ figurine auction that he's kept going since his freshman year, with a current bid price of $452,000, even though the seller died of old age 18 months ago. Much merriment ensues.

Finally, eBay will decree that in order to curb this abuse, you only get so many bids before your bidding privileges are cut off. Realistically, everyone will object to that: the buyers who can't bring themselves to ever bid their maximum, the sellers who think their potential profits are being curtailed, and eBay management who see their FVF income getting hobbled. So after much deliberation, they abandon bid extensions as a Bad Idea, and decide that they're going to have auctions end at a fixed, predetermined time... which is where we came in.

[papyruspapillo]

Ridiculous suggestion.

[southern*sweet*tea]

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@a_c_green wrote:

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. Some graduating senior will brag about the Precious Moments™ figurine auction that he's kept going since his freshman year, with a current bid price of $452,000, even though the seller died of old age 18 months ago. Much merriment ensues.

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[chrysylys]

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@eagle7918 wrote:

  What does everyone else think. 

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I think this has been discussed thousands of times since the late 1990s on these boards and has been resoundingly rejected every time.

[the*dog*ate*my*tablecloth]

That's because nobody has ever come up with a good reason to make the change that would universally affect how auctions work. People who suggest it never consider the true implications of the change, only see dollar signs in being that ONE seller who may have late bidders.

As is often repeated, it is a solution in search of a problem (that doesn't exist).

[fern*wood]

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@eagle7918 wrote:

... I have placed my highest bid before at the end and then missed it by 5 cents, that is crazy. If I had 3 minutes to think about it I could have bid again and again until I decided to give up or  they do...

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If you are unhappy because you lost, and would have bid more if you had the time, then obviously you did not bid your maximum to begin with.

[the*dog*ate*my*tablecloth]

Oh and I've been recently taken by a conversation I had with my very smart college aged son. He was talking about some rule developed by Kant that takes any idea and extends it to everything. He developed it as an ethical test but I like the idea of extending it to everything we're considering.

If any and all auctions could be extended for an unknown period of time Ebay auctions would be chaos. Buyers would either quit bidding or would find new "sniping" tools that could be set to bid in minimum increments ad nauseum in infinity. It would be horrible for everyone involved. Especially those sellers whose listings close after the never ending auction.

[couldabeenworse]

I'd bet half the posters on this thread (including me) had the same idea the first time they got sniped.  I recall getting pretty much the same reaction when I suggested this on the boards back in 1999.  But I quickly realized that eBay is not a "real" auction, and that the procedure made sense for what eBay was.

If eBay implemented these extensions, it shrinks the bidding pool from the millions of people who could place a proxy bid down to the relative handful that could be online in the final moments of the listing.   That could still work for truly unique items, but not for mass merchandising hundreds or thousands of similar items. 

[castlemagicmemories]

This has been proposed throughout the years, but is really not a good idea.

Given the world wide exposure, you have people in many different time zones.  They are not going to sit up at four in the AM just to keep bidding every three minutes because someone else does not know what their true max is.

This is NOT going to get more money for the seller because it is the nibble method of bidding, and is reactive bidding.  So you have two people,duking it out, who have no idea of what they really want to pay, and thus are more likely to get caught up in the back and forth and not honor their bid.

Your friend may find his buying restricted if he keeps on not honoring his bid; bid retractions and cancellations should be used rarely, if at all.  He can be blocked for unpaid item strikes and for violation reports, and it just takes a few for this to kick in.

In losing by 5 cents, that is the luck of the draw.  Your max wasn't high enough.  It happens.  Someone entered a higher bid and won.  You don't know that extensions on time would have made you the winner.

Given the online set up, bid your max, as late as you can, be prepared to honor your bid if you win.  

Good Luck