HustleBlog

I have been a huge fan of ebay since I got my first account in the late 1990s. I have been both a buyer and seller in hundreds of transactions. It is the greatest place to find things really cheap and things that are really rare/obscure.

I went through a period when I was buying damaged guitars, fixing them and then selling them back on ebay for a profit. During this time I noticed that during some auctions people would bid frantically with seconds left. Research led me to auction sniping as the culprit.

Ebay will let you bid your maximum amount at any time during an auction. If you have the highest bid at the end you will win. However, nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd. When a person outbids another, there is a tendency for the first bidder to come back and bid more than they originally intended. This makes the auction look more desirable to other bidders and they bid on things they never intended to bid on.

Enter auction sniping. The ideal time to bid on an auction and not attract too much attention is at the last moment before it ends. You can do this manually and sit there and wait for the auction clock to tick down. You might bid too soon or too late or make a mistake, have your connection go down, etc. You could write software to post to ebay your bid but that is a lot of work and maintenance or you could use a service that does this.

There are many services out there that charge a fee per month or fee per auction but there is one that does not. Gixen.com. It sneaks in during the last few seconds on an auction and bids for you. This allows you to get the best bang for your buck. It is fairly free of frills but gets the job done and has proved reliable in my experience of 50 or so auctions. If you are able to link to it from a webpage you control, they will even let you go beyound the 10 simultaneous auctions.

Try it here.