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OT: Ebay sniping services - bidslammer fails it

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krusadr

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Anyone got experience with bidslammer or anyother ebay sniping service?

After reading a thread in the lighting forum http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1025&message=17969524

I tried BidSlammer. I gave them $20 bucks after reading that they have a 99.98% success rate (at getting your snipe in - not at making you bid high enough!)

It seems that that promise is total, utter and complete B/S. Two out of five snipes have failed when my bid was the highest and should have won the auction. The bidslammer automated "help desk" even states something like "we are extremely suprised when a bid fails"

and

"Approximately three or four times each day, some bids (out of thousands) are lost for reasons that are not entirely clear. Our best guess is that network congestion at either bidslammer or eBay may have interfered with this snipe."

LOL - well two of their four a day were on my account and I've only had 5 snipes so far.

My snipes were all in place at least an hour before the auction ended and it wasn't due to the bid being too low, it is due to bidslammer not doing what it says it does.

Interestingly I was still charged for those failures.

Anyone use bidslammer much?
--

'Silence! What is all this insolence? You will find yourself in gladiator school vewy quickly with wotten behaviour like that.'
 
krusadr said:
Anyone got experience with bidslammer or anyother ebay sniping
service?
Click to expand...
I use the free version of hammersnipe. I have won some and lost some with it, but never lost when I was the high bidder.

Not to take anyones side, but network traffic may be the real factor in lots of these auctions. Getting a bid in 4 secs before the end of the auction probably eliminates any chance of network traffic making you miss the bid. Getting the bid in 1.5 seconds before means your bid will be the last one in, assuming it gets in.

I am not sure how easy it is to hit the sweet spot in bidding just before the end of the auction. I can recall several years ago I use to watch the end of auctions realtime. At 5 sec before the end of the auction I would place my bid. Sometimes it got in, sometimes it did not.

In any case I recomend using the free version of sinping tools unless you are really making lots of bid.
 
linuxworks said:
it seemed to work but it was always a catch-up game since ebay
changes their page format quite often and the parsers have to keep
working around ebay's silliness.
Click to expand...
Yep. eBay has an API, which would be great if you could use it. But it doesn't bid, and if you use the API you have to sign an agreement not to screen-scrape.

--
Seen in a fortune cookie:
Fear is the darkroom where negatives are developed
 
Tom Rowland said:
Not to take anyones side, but network traffic may be the real
factor in lots of these auctions.
Click to expand...
If they are doing it right, this is unlikely. Any decently written snicping software should adjust for latency.
Tom Rowland said:
Getting a bid in 4 secs before
the end of the auction probably eliminates any chance of network
traffic making you miss the bid. Getting the bid in 1.5 seconds
before means your bid will be the last one in, assuming it gets in.
Click to expand...
This is nuts. There is no advantage to getting your bid in 1.5 seconds before the end of the auction. All you want to do with sniping is bid late enough to bypass incremental bidders. There is a slight advatange to being the first snipe, not the last one, as in case of a tie the earlier bid wins. I place my snipes 10 seconds before the auction ends.
Tom Rowland said:
In any case I recomend using the free version of sinping tools
unless you are really making lots of bid.
Click to expand...
I second that.

--
Seen in a fortune cookie:
Fear is the darkroom where negatives are developed
 
ebay tells you this. The earlier bid wins. Even if you bid at the last second eBay will calculate that my bid was placed before yours or the sniping program.

Sniping only works when there are no maximum bids. This happens often but is never guaranteed.
A maximum bid can be placed at the start of an auction.
I used it all the time
The sniping tools never tell you ths.
--

 
Simply bid what you think the item is worth then forget it, you can still get a bargain.
 
Ian Yаtes said:
ebay tells you this. The earlier bid wins. Even if you bid at the
last second eBay will calculate that my bid was placed before yours
or the sniping program.
Click to expand...
Absolutely.
Ian Yаtes said:
Sniping only works when there are no maximum bids.
Click to expand...
Sniping prevents your proxy from being bid up by folks who have no clue what the item is worth to them, and bid in increments until they beat your proxy. It also helps prevent shill bidding and helps when bidding on an item where there are many available in different auctions.

--
Seen in a fortune cookie:
Fear is the darkroom where negatives are developed
 
carl english said:
Simply bid what you think the item is worth then forget it, you can
still get a bargain.
Click to expand...
I think you both miss the point. We all understand how ebay bidding works. The point of last minute bidding isn't just to win the item, as you correctly say that can be done by just placing a high bid in the normal way, the point of last minute bidding is to keep the price low.

Lets say you and I are bidding on a softbox. I decide I want to pay up to $300 for it. You have decided to pay $250. You place your $250 bid. The bidding starts at $25 so the high bid shows as $25 (you).

If I input my $300 bid I will now show as the high bidder at $255 and you may well decide "it's worth another bid". Many people get caught up in the emotion of the bidding.

However if I input my $300 at the very last few seconds you will happily leave your bid alone showing you as the high bidder at $25 with seemingly noone else interested until you discover too late that I won it at $255.

Hope this helps.

--

'Silence! What is all this insolence? You will find yourself in gladiator school vewy quickly with wotten behaviour like that.'
 
The point with bidslammer is that they claim 99.98% success and I've had two out of five now fail due to them missing getting my bid in on time.

There's no phone number to call so I've lost $20.

Let it be a warning to everyone else.

--

'Silence! What is all this insolence? You will find yourself in gladiator school vewy quickly with wotten behaviour like that.'
 
Since I wrote this I've been away from my PC for about 8 hours. In that time a few more auctions have ended and two more have finished with prices LOWER than my highest bid. bidslammer quietly charges me for each failure but offeres no explaination. So far I rate bidslammer as not 99.98% success rate but nearer 10% success rate.

Tell your friends. I paid bidslammer through my paypal account via my credit card and I'm going to tell my credit card company to stop that payment. If paypal bitches about it then i will make it a personal crusade to tell the world about it.
krusadr said:
The point with bidslammer is that they claim 99.98% success and
I've had two out of five now fail due to them missing getting my
bid in on time.

There's no phone number to call so I've lost $20.

Let it be a warning to everyone else.

--
'Silence! What is all this insolence? You will find yourself in
gladiator school vewy quickly with wotten behaviour like that.'
Click to expand...
--

'Silence! What is all this insolence? You will find yourself in gladiator school vewy quickly with wotten behaviour like that.'
 
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