Sniping.

The Internet has provided ways to innovate many aspects of modern day living, even in the arena of auctioning. An auction is a process by which buyers and sellers interact by placing and taking bids for certain products. The determination of the winner of the auction is dependent on the type of auction that is being held, but usually it is the highest bidder who wins.

With the advent of the Internet, auctioning has been modified into a world-connected, fast-paced form of buying and selling. People from all over the world can participate in these auctions. A seller from the United States of America can post his item on an on-line auction and expect offers from people from all parts of the world in real time. The on-line auction systems usually proceed with their bidding procedures with a certain length of time. When an item is posted for sale, there is an assigned timeframe for bidding for the said item.

On-line bidding systems such as E-bay can be arenas for bid wars and can be ruled by bid snipers.

Sniping In military language, a sniper is someone who measures his shots so precisely that every time he pulls the trigger, someone goes down, either dead or injured. This is the basis for naming an auction sniper as such.

An auction bid sniper is someone or something (software) that places the highest bid during the dying seconds of bidding in on-line auctions that employ time limits for bidding. This prevents other people from winning the bid because the sniper attacks at the moment when nothing else can be done by his competitors. Sniping isn’t really illegal, it’s just a way of out smarting one’s competitors.

Counter Sniping Even tough sniping isn’t necessarily illegal in the auction world, it is still discouraged and fought by auction systems because they discourage participation from other potential buyers, especially in future auctions. Your eBay bid is still the highest as the auction is about to close. You wait excitedly by your computer expecting to be notified that you have won, but, somehow you have lost. In the last seconds of the auction a new bid has appeared, too late for you to respond. You have been sniped. Some sniper comes in and bids a little higher than the highest bid as the clock runs out of time, and thus winning the bid. At eBay, sniping is against the rules, but it does not slow the snipers down. Usually, even if you report it, the sniper gets away with it, and you will have lost the item that you wanted to win so badly. Unfortunately, to avoid losing the items you want to snipers at eBay, you have to take on the sniper mentality, and snipe in a way that will not violate eBay’s rules.

Snipping can be done in one of two ways. The first way is the safest, but not necessarily the easiest. Simply keep up with the item you are bidding on. Make a note of the date and time that the auction will end, and make sure that you are in front of your computer and logged into the auction well before that specific time. The objective is to either bid higher than the highest bid during the last few seconds, which are what snipers do, or to simply make sure that you are not outbid by a sniper.

Remember that sniping is against the rules, so you should log in about 30 or 40 minutes before the bidding ends, and get your bid up until it is the highest bid. At that point, all you need to do is to keep an eye out to make sure that nobody else raises the bid. If you have been logged in for a while, this cannot be considered sniping.

Using this method, you must be aware of automatic bidders, and it is very hard to bid against people who use bidding software. That software has been designed for snipping, and your chances of outbidding the software manually are very slim, which leads us to the second method of snipping, Snipping services.

Snipping services are very easy to find online, and they are relatively inexpensive. You can also purchase your own snipping software and become a sniper. Purchasing your own software is usually the best way to go if you bid on a lot of items. Set up the software, tell it which auction to watch and what the highest price you are willing to bid, and let it do the work, but just remember that it is against the rules. You will be running the risk of getting banned from eBay, although eBay seldom enforces this rule. Outbidding somebody is one thing, but sniping is something altogether different.