Man, I'm surprised how many people are getting their panties in a knot over this. Guess free market competition and ingenuity are only good things when you don't have to face them, huh? :rolleyes:
I learned years ago that for the overwhelming majority(1) of items I have an interest in buying, I can get them elsewhere for about the same price with less hassle(2). So, despite having a logon (jfruser, just like here) since 1999-ish, I rarely use ebay for (partly) that reason.
As to your practice of using software to "snipe," it is something I suspected occurred and contemplated writing a perl script to do for my own self. I decided against it, because it wasn't worth the hassle writing the script when most items are available elsewhere for similar prices and less time investment.
I don't see any use in ebay outlawing the practice, as outlawing something that can not be enforced is generally a bad idea. The above mentioned gunbroker "auction closes 15 min after last bid" is typical of GB, which is heavily tilted in favor of the seller.
I also noticed the faux-bidder/seller on several occasions and really put 2+2 together when I bid on one seller's items, a week apart. I lost both auctions, but the seller later sent an email after each saying the winning bidder backed out and would I like to buy it at my highest bid? Uh-huh.
That (faux bidding) practice ought to be banned as it is both dishonest and enforceable to some degree.
If one is a buyer and a buyer
only, I can see the sniping as having no downside. But, I doubt that folks who are so invested in ebay time/money/whatever-wise (3) will remain only buyers.
For sellers, I would bet dollars to donuts that sniping is harmful. One means is that it reduces the market for their wares. When folks such as myself start to smell something is a little rotten, like the practice of sniping, we are likely to go to another market. As I have done.
The funny thing is, the buyer who snipes (say, 1911 holsters) and then sells related goods, is driving away his own customers with his behavior. IOW, they are fouling their own nest. For the buyer who is also a seller, sniping is both its own reward
and punishment. makattak, our resident economist might be able to illuminate this.
One last thing:
Writing the script to snipe would have been ingenuity, just like the first caveman who picked up a bone to whack another caveman. A third caveman, observing the first two, is not ingenious when he copies the actions of the first. IOW, using someone else's ingenious code to get over is more akin to base cunning than ingenuity.
(1) A conservative estimate would be 999/1000 dollars I net.
(2) And almost undoubtedly with a smaller shipping fee.
(3) That they'll buy or install third-party apps or give their logon & PW data to a third party.
