1. Adjusting Buffer Time: With the free service your bid is placed anywhere from 10 - 25 seconds before the auction ends. This number is random and is generated when the bid is scheduled. Most people will agree that 25 seconds allows other bidders to see your bid and bid themselves. Therefore using a lower snipe time and setting it to your preferred time puts you in control.

2. The fact is that bids are sometimes missed. With that said, the number of 3 second bids that are missed is almost exactly the same as 20 second bids. This is because when a network hiccup occurs or eBay is sluggish, this will affect any bid.

3. When you sign up using PayPal, all current items will be updated to the Priority Service. The default buffer time of 10 seconds will be applied to all of them. If you would like to change that, just edit each item and set a new buffer time. NOTE: You will also have an unlimited number of snipe points. Once your payment is processed this all happens within a few seconds (Make sure to pay by PayPal balance or with the Credit Card on file with PayPal).

Finally, the PS offers better / faster support service and access to other premier service (Bid Groups, Snipe Tool, etc.). Hope you will give it a try and see what you think.

Beyond getting bids in closer to the end of an auction, does electing or subscribing to priority service provide a smarter and more efficient bidding engine? How?

Does setting bid time as close as possible to the end-auction-time increase the risk of the computer not getting one’s high bid limit under the wire?

How does acceptance of the priority service option for individual items listed in the Current Auctions screen effect the number of remaining free points in the current time period?

Many thanks!

Today, I finally won an auction on an item that I’ve been trying to get for a few months now, and the only reason I got it at the price that I did (even though similar items have sold for similar prices in that time) was because I contacted a seller who had some inconsistencies in his description and worked out what the item actually was. The first time I had this item sniped out from under me, I would have been perfectly willing to beat the winning bid, but it was only after coming back to the computer to find that I had been outbid within the last 10 seconds of the auction (after the winning bidder had incrementally increased their bid until they beat mine in the time leading up to this) that I had the chance to say ‘why yes- I would have paid five dollars more’.

Perhaps I’m just not of the mindset to do well in online auctions, but to me it seems that the possibility of sniping negates the rationality of establishing some arbitrary maximum to which proxy bids will increase.