eBay Sniping

What is Sniping?

Is Sniping Legal?

How Does Sniping Save Me Money?

Let us look at two case studies: One where you are placing proxy bids throughout the lifetime of the auction, and one where you are sniping a bid in the last seconds of bidding.

Does this look familiar? I can't emphasize this point enough: Placing bids early in the auction only serves to push up the price, especially if you are placing proxy bids. By waiting until the last few seconds of the auction to place your $25 proxy bid in the above example, you have saved more than 50% on the end price of the auction. This is a typical result for sniping, that is why it is so popular. In essence it all comes down to who has the higest bid at the end, but sniping does eliminate the element of "one-upping" that causes the auction price to rapidly climb.

How do I Snipe?

What are the best Sniping programs?

There are many Sniping programs on the market. They can roughly be divided into three types: PC Based, Web Based and Hybrid.

PC Based snipers run on your computer. For them to be able to snipe you must leave your computer on and be able to connect to the Internet. You also have to ensure your PC clock is synchronised to eBay time. PC Sniping products are the cheapest option, ranging from between $10 to $50 one-off charge to download and install the software.

Web Based sniping services usually require you to join up to a web site. Most of these services charge you per auction, a percentage fee or a monthly charge. You do not need to rely on your PC to carry out your sniping with web based services. These can be very expensive to use and not as user friendly as PC based snipers.

Hybrid sniping tools are a new breed of sniping program. They combine the best of PC based snipers and web based services and are very reasonably priced.

Snipe Utility	Type	Price	Rating	Comment
SnipeRight Professional	Hybrid	$19.95 one-off		Easy to use, integrated browser, feature rich and very reliable. Best of breed! My personal pick.
BidNapper/ezSniper	Web based	$19.95 per 12 winning snipes/ 1% per winning snipe		Easy to use, however expensive and not 100% reliable.
Auction Stealer	Web based	$8.99/month $19.99/3 month $34.99/6 month		Not user friendly - cut and paste from auction pages to place a snipe. Slow.
Auction Tamer	PC Based	$15.95/6 months $24.95/year		Integrated browser, but awkward to use and navigate.
Auction Sentry	PC Based	$14.95 one-off		Cheap and easy to use but functionlity lacking. Support also a little lacking.
iSnipeIT	PC Based	$34.95 one-off		Fully featured but notoriously unreliable and no support to speak of.

I will be adding more snipers to this list as they are evaluated.