posted on November 26, 2002 07:29:04 AM new
Lately I have been having trouble (selling) with snipers on Ebay and have been losing out on expensive items. And the site is too big and wieldy for me. Am going back to bargainandHaggle, which I use off and on, but really like. http://www.bargainandhaggle.com/user/ulink.asp?lid=1&uid=202120
Just wondered if anyone here uses IOffer and is it any good? Also does any one know where to sell very old tools?
posted on November 26, 2002 08:53:50 AM newLosing out to snipers is not a very valid reason to leave the only real online auction site.
If you proxy bid the maximum amount that you are will to pay for an item there is no way you can lose to a sniper unless he exceeded your maximum bid. The proxy bid takes the emotion out of the auction and whatever the sniper does has no effect on you. If the sniper outbids you then he was willing to pay more than you for the auction item.
posted on November 26, 2002 09:03:29 AM new
It is not buying I am talking about. It is selling. for the same reason you say Ebay is good for buyers, it is bad for sellers. Bidders wait till last minute to get a bargain, and they certainly have been. I do get more money on BargainandHaggle when I get a sale there. And they seem to be more user freindly.
posted on November 26, 2002 09:04:54 AM new
Not sure I understand what you mean. You are selling an item and snipers are making your auctions sell for less?
How can that be? A sniper has the last bid and obviously bids more than anyone else if he wins. If the sniper wasn't there your items would go for even less wouldn't they?
Perhaps the market has dropped off for what you consider your "expensive items" or it is too saturated.
posted on November 26, 2002 09:10:18 AM new
aliceroad, your last reply came in as I was sending mine.
I guess you just have to try other sites where you think you can do better than ebay. Or put the items on a website and hope it draws more upscale buyers. When I sell on my site I get higher prices than ebay but it takes longer for the items to sell.
posted on November 26, 2002 09:42:43 AM new
Yes, it takes longer to get a buyer, but I can list more things at one time, and still manage my inventory.
The problem with selling when there are snipers: the snipers many times have not been bidding till the last minure. Therefor, people who would otherwise bid higher (I have been to many auctions in my life, and these are no longer like auctions) reserve their bids. I know this happens, I have done it myself.
I offer things on ebay when I need a fast turnover, because my house is too cluttered.
posted on November 26, 2002 09:54:46 AM new
The people that you think will bid higher? The ones you think are reserving their bids? They are the cheapies! They are hoping to get the item for less and then they are the first to whine when a sniper comes in and they always say they would have bid more if they had the chance. Oh yeah, they only had 5 or 7 or 10 days to do so. Why didn't they? Because they are too cheap!
posted on November 26, 2002 10:29:40 AM new
But I am not blaming the sniper. I am saying, I am losing money with the prices on Ebay. You can bid in one catiegor, or two, for double the money. You can pay extra for this and that. I am not complaingin aobu t the sniper. I am not even complaining. I am saying, I do not like to lose as much money as I do at Ebay. And I am wondering if anyone has experience with I offer.
thanks for the comments, anyway.
posted on November 26, 2002 12:42:32 PM new
Ebay is the "Broadway" of online auctions. Only the best sellers can stay there for any length of time and make a profit. It is extremely competitive and the menu of extra fees is long. You do not need to spring for 15 cents a photo after the free one as you can webhost your photos somewhere for free or a low monthly cost. Listing in 2 categories is only for a terrific auction item in my opinion. Bold or featured or a stupid gift icon is a waste of money. That leaves a 30 cents listing fee that is all that is really needed.
The lesser online auction sites are "off-Broadway". The sellers at these sites can not successfully compete in the ebay arena. There's nothing wrong with off-Broadway but one shouldn't except the same results as a Broadway show.
posted on November 26, 2002 03:05:11 PM new
Aliceroad I agree with what you say. What is happening is quite simple, almost 90 percent of all auctions are it seems lately won by snipers. And sniping programs have caused sellers to lose many what were free auction highlighting tools.
In the past pre sniping a person would go into auction and if interested place a bid, which was recorded immediately. That way even if it wasn't their highest bid it a least allowed the item to show up in their bid items watchlist. Now they just set the sniper to do the bidding at the last second hoping of course to snipe the auction.
The free tools the seller loses are
1)bids on an item cause buyers to take a look either out of curiosity or at least that hey if its got bids it must be something special.
2)Hot auction icon and list, it might get into the hot items list with sniping but its at the last millisecond so does you no good.
The other thing with sniping is it doesn't give the buyer even a second to change his mind and increase his bid, especially new buyers who aren't aware of sniping programs and I Know a lot of new buyers at sites that rather then get a snipe program just don't bother to bid. I realize that most members here are computer literate, but the truth of the matter is that most surfers are not, most are not capapble of downloading and configuring even a basic program like a sniper program so rather than do it and after being outbid by snipers and getting frustrated just leave. I know you say well he could place a proxy bid and just let the chips fall, but the truth is that they take a look at the auction see no bids so place a conserative bid-human nature- not realizing that their are actually lots of bids pending via snipers. Let face it at a real auction part of the excitement is auction fever and human nature of not wanting to be beat, the sniper take this element out. The truth is that prices on Ebay have been falling at almost the same rate as new snipers coming onboard.
posted on November 26, 2002 03:20:19 PM new
Toolman
That is exactly what Iam talking about. Thank you. Now that being said, I still have aproblem with all these categories. I have been doing a bit of reserach and see that it does help to have them all covered. So there goes a lot of extra money down the drain.
posted on November 26, 2002 03:46:09 PM new
The old ebay had several bids on most items and a nice 70+% sell through rate.
The current ebay has usually one or two bids ( and usually none at all ) and maybe a 40% sell through rate. After a while a seller hopes and prays for at least a last second bid to show up.
The snipers are a non-issue on the current ebay. Any bidder that gets shut out of an auction win at the last moment because they didn't enter their highest amount they would pay for the item via the proxy bidding system quickly learns to do so on the next auction they bid on.
posted on November 26, 2002 04:56:20 PM new
I agree with the sell through rate, but that is again that the items are losing what in the past were great free tools
1)hot items list: I used to always scan through it to see what was hot and why, if for no other reason than to improve posting tools
2)even the fact the item has bids if not hot showed interest.
But I don't agree they give their best bid in a proxy, I am really a live auction nut and the amount of times we see people go over what originaly was their high bid when push comes to shove is amazing. With sniping they do not get this chance.
So what we have elected to do is:
No sniping, if a bid is placed within the last second or minute of a auction, the auction automatically carries on for five minutes and will not close till no bids have been placed for five minutes.
Our system emails ever bidder and person who has the item on their watch list an announcement of the high bid and that they have five minutes to either increase their bid or let the time expire.
Now I know a lot are going to say that takes the fun out of it, yeah but only for the sniper, it means everbody gets equal oppurtuntity and after all we are working for the seller not the sniper, get their item as much exposure as possible, give people as much chance to bid as possible. Then you don't have buyers feeling they lost by who has the fastest connection or bid sniper program. Nor sellers saying well we didn't get a good price because we were sniped. Sniping sucks for a seller.
The only draw back I can see is the odd case of buyer remorse.
posted on November 26, 2002 05:57:40 PM new
Yahoo automatically extends an auction if the sellers elects to use that free option. It is really academic at Yahoo as they have a very small sell through rate and most items get no more than one bid if they are lucky. Many sellers use a FIRST BID WINS format as they know they'll only get one bid.
The proxy bid takes the emotion out of the bidder. You're right about live auctions were emotion can run high. The proxy bid allows the bidder to not have to be at the auction close and pay a lot more than they intended to originally pay. Many times buyers may overpay for item because of the emotion of non proxy bidding or live autions and regret their purchases/purchase prices.
posted on November 27, 2002 09:26:10 AM new
I think we would all like to get early bids on our auctions and have bids climb all week long but those days are over.
Don't blame snipers for this. Snipers have been around since ebay started. It's just that buyers now realize that the item that they desperately want is offered by numerous sellers or will be on ebay again very soon. Unless you have something that is diffucult to find don't expect bidding wars like the old days of ebay.
Many learn that if they bid early their bid is shilled because shilling is also rampant on ebay. Another good reason for sniping.
Sniping sucks for a seller. I have been surprised by the ending price on many of my auctions because of the snipers that all came in at once. As a seller or a bidder, this is one of the most exciting aspects of an online auction. All the sniping at the end obviously drives up the price for the seller.
I have never used software to snipe but I do snipe all the items I buy. Most of the auctions I bid on do have other snipers and it's a rush for me. All of us competing at the same time drives up the price.
And all the whiners that cry that they didn't have a chance? They had a chance just like the rest of us but they were too cheap to bid their max. Newbies learn very quickly how the online auction works if they want to stay in the game.
posted on November 27, 2002 09:46:57 AM new
Snipers using software or services like esnipe take chances of losing their item due to a computer glitch. Can you imagine wanting a certain item a lot just to lose it because the computer was unable to make their bid? It could be ebay's servers running very slow at the time that hinder the manual placement of a bid too.
For a new online auction site to promote anti-sniping features shows that the powers that be know very little about the online auction scene.
There are so many new auction sites appearing almost daily and not a single one except a few narrow niche sites like playersauctions.com have made more than a few dollars profit. It is almost like a Gold Rush based solely on one miner's incredible success ( ebay ) instead of many miner's having very good successes. Is it greed or ego's that propel these new sites to keep popping up?
As a side note: Many new auction sites are merely the owner's personal auction items appearing in an auction format and these sites do not count.
posted on November 27, 2002 10:07:31 AM newIs it greed or ego's that propel these new sites to keep popping up?
The owners most likely think that they can do things better than ebay and that they can offer the things that they find lacking at ebay. Most of them are probably sincere in their thinking.
But their biggest hurdle will be to get the buyers. They may attract buyers that are new to online auctions but once those same buyers discover ebay they will most likely go there because of the huge amount of items to choose from. If they collect anything interesting they will soon find out that for now the best selection will always be on ebay.
posted on November 27, 2002 10:31:02 AM new
Again I disagree with you both sniping had nothing to do with getting a good price, they would have bid that amount anyways, you do lose all those last minute excitement of the auction bidders without a snipe program.
Have been involved in this debate before here is an excert from that board:
I vowed I was going to walk away from this item but just can't. Another good reason against sniping is :
How many time have you been looking at an item, done the research, placed it into your sniper( got to admit I'm a procrastinist -Yes I have a snipe program(in fact a great one) and my dual zeon workstation is on a 100 meg fibre optic line(can't get faster than that) and since I use Atom Time same program as ebay to automatically set my computers clock every three hours I can place a bid at the last second and I mean the last second and know I will get it in. Point to this being that I can probably beat 90 percent of the snipe programs and all that are dialup again going back to one with the fastest computer, quickest sure connection and best bidsniper program probably wins. Do I feel good about doing it , you bet!! But thats me as a buyer talking not a seller.
Anyways back to my original point of this post. You got a new seller, posted an item, being a new seller he gone into the closed auctions and checked what his item average selling price, thinks great, posts his item waits one day, three days, five days and my god the auction got only 1o hours to go, and not one bid(because everbody has used a snipe prgram or is waiting to the last minute) puff all of sudden the item is gone reason posting error etc etc, god I have even seen the experienced sellers get wet feet and pull items. Lets face it the best deals usually come from new sellers, maybe he will be back but then again maybe not, or if he does its going to have a high reserve. He's out his posting fees, his time, the loss of sleep, worry about whether this was a mistake placing an item with no reserve. I know what this is all about 2 years ago I took a couple of my prize muscle cars to Barrett Jackson, got talked into no reserve by their sales manager(smooth talker), he got me all convinced that no reserve cars always go for more etc etc bragging about how they get 90-100 percent sales (yeah right they got no reserve what else are they going to do, I still shake my head as I get off the Banana Boat) etc. Well we arrive in Phoneix and went down to the auction thursday night to check out the action !! . and Christ their giving away classic cars, to make a long story short my cars were set to go on primetime Sunday, didn't sleep and almost loaded them back up for the haul back to the Great White North, (if they weren't already inside the gate behind a couple of big guards( hey BJ has this one figured out) I probably would have), I didn't and actually did really well on them, but had no finger nails left, and probably was the worst three days my poor wife ever spent, with a guy that was continually having anxiety attacks. Rambling again, but Bid sniping sucks for sellers and in this instance for buyers as well. The only thing good about it is for the 20 percent of ebayers who now have it or the programers selling it.
posted on November 27, 2002 10:36:51 AM new
kiara
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Is it greed or ego's that propel these new sites to keep popping up?
......
I do not think greed is why most people do it. It is a challange, and they may not like something about Ebay.
...
The owners most likely think that they can do things better than ebay and that they can offer the things that they find lacking at ebay. Most of them are probably sincere in their thinking. ....
They may not most likesly think they can do something better than Ebay. Maybe they are interested in a small personal site. ....
But their biggest hurdle will be to get the buyers...
Yes, this may be their biggest hurdle. However, they may be interested in a subject that has long been a hobby or of interest to them. And they may be looking for like minded people. For instance: Booksbybid.com The people there seem to know much more about books than those who buy on half.com. since books are of great interest to me, this is, for me, right minded people......
They may attract buyers that are new to online auctions but once those same buyers discover ebay they will most likely go there because of the huge amount of items to choose from. If they collect anything interesting they will soon find out that for now the best selection will always be on ebay....As A buyer, I will look at other venues first. One of the last things I bought was an artist's doll, at a great savings. Where there are fewer buyers, there are likely to be better bargains.
We all know the great struggle to survive against Ebay. We all know Ebay has done a fine job. I like the old site, personal, unweildy, and freindly. Though I have over 700 sales on Ebay, I am not interested in big business. It is just the way some of us are.
Now has anyone used I offer?
posted on November 27, 2002 11:16:17 AM new
Now to reply to the new auction site and what a hard road a new site is going to have.
I do have to agree with some of your points,
But type in **** Ebay and you get a lot of pages of buyers who have had their fill, of the lack of service, lack of caring and downright ignorance of Ebay. I know thats why I built my site, Used ebay for 4 years had over 300 positive feedbacks as a buyer all for hi-end items, but then got taken 3 times in one month for about 3,000.00 US, not the end of the world but it hurt more a matter of pride. Well tried to get ebay to help and ebay did nothing, all I got was automated replies, buyer beware, and all that crap, never once was able to get a human being just form mails. So I made the mistake of going into the forums and asking(politely what other buyers do in this case)
well got their attention all right - in twenty minutes banned me(not only banned me totally removed my account) from the site and pulled my posts. And the sellers that took me they are still trading on ebay - something definetly wrong with that picture.
Also never was able to collect on their $200.00 joke of a insurance program less $25.00 of course, as I didn't didn't do everything according to their imposssibly timed procedure.
Anyways rather than continue to waste my time
I took my frustrations out on the keyboard and thats how I ended up being another auction site.
So built the above site Which is or will be www.auctionfraud.ca, and plan on using it for anyone that commits fraud on any of our sites, and hope that they sue me, much cheaper to counterclaim in Canada than start an action and our courts don't give a damn about privacy they are more concerned about fraud.
As to wasting my time I think not, for a couple of reasons, Ebay has had such a bad rap in Canada with fraud that it has really not caught on like it has in the States, so in other words they don't have the market totally sewn up. Currently only 1 in twenty or less web users are registered. Canadians hate putting credit cards on the web, are very concerned with the continual reports of Ebay fraud and hackers trying to get credit card info etc.
Also If you take a look at the site I offer so much more than auctions, so I am going after all forms of advertising both local classifieds and auctions and we really do offer a lot more than any other site which can be seen here: http://www.u-1.ca/whyfree.shtml
Its funny the site isn't finished but more people register every day and I get more email like this one this morning
> <PRE>here is an idea for you.......like many other i used to sell a lot of
> vehicals on ebay.......untill they went up on the charges . i think its
$80
> now.....many car people are looking for a good place to sell vehicals ,
with
> out paying the $80.....try advertising your site in hemmings motor news .
> porsche panorama [ the club mag ] , execellence mag . beemer mag , etc.
> anyway ill spread the word about your site
>
And not like so many of the other hosted sites I am capable of millions of listings and since this is just a bee in my bonnet, I will be here for the duration. Thanks for your concern.
posted on November 27, 2002 12:58:02 PM new
The number of sellers on ebay is much like the population of a nation. Every day there may be 2,000,000 deaths in a hypothetical nation. If you only look at that figure you can extrapolate that the nation is dying at a very fast rate. But if you factor in the 2,050,000 live births every day as well as 20,000 immigrants granted citizenship then you can extrapolate a vigorusly growing populatation. That is ebay. There are many sellers that get fed up and leave but new sellers outnumber them.
Look at these graphs of auction items listed on ebay for the past few years:
These example of sellers pulling their auction items because they got cold feet are rookie auction seller errors. After a while sellers learn to either use a reserve or to set the item at the minimum amount they are will to accept for their item. Ebay is becoming more and more like Yahoo and the other auctions in that many of the items are receiving either no bids or just one bid. That is turning ebay into a store like Half.com .
Most bids are received at the tailend of an auction. That is the reality of online auctions. If you bid early you are committed to that bid and if the same item appears after you bid at a greatly reduced price or better s/h terms or whatever then you can do little about it with ebay's retraction rules and guidelines. It's best to research an item and watchlist/bookmark the best bets and bid at the end. With 9 or 10 million auction items it's best to look at the 'going, going, gone' section as the others will still be there tomorrow.
There are many reasons besides sniping of why the bids are usually made at the last segment of an auction duration.
[ edited by robertsmithson on Nov 27, 2002 01:04 PM ]
posted on November 27, 2002 02:22:19 PM new
I agree exactly with what you are saying except with regard to sniping.
The facts are that the sell through rate has almost fallen in half from a high of 70% to
now about 35-40%, the amount of listing continue to grow and the amount of sellers increase either by the fact they are multi-nationals dumping products or hype used to attract sellers. The truth of the matter Ebay has not promoted their site to attract buyers, went to one of their seminars it was all geared to sellers, buying wasn't even addressed. They have not addressed some major problems:
1) That they have to attract buyers, the site is not search engine friendly except the stores, plus they push short auctions which never get spidered anyways. They lose all possible traffic from the search engines hey 10 million users might search ebay but hundreds of millions use search engines.
2)Their own internal search often doesn't spider the site for 24 hours or more and it is way to vague, often returning page after page of unrelated items because of keyword stuffing by experienced sellers.
3)The pages have to much flash and are slow to load for those on dial-up great for highspeed user buts sucks bigtime for dialup
here is except from Site solutions analyasis on Ebay done today:
Download Time: Time Taken To Download On A 14.4Kbs Modem 63.84 Seconds
On A 28.8Kbs Modem 36.24 Seconds
On A 33.6Kbs Modem 31.41 Seconds
On A 56Kbs Modem 25.12 Seconds
On A ISDN 128Kbs Modem 10.14 Seconds
On A T1 1.44Mbps 3.79 Seconds PROBLEM SOLUTION Your download time is greater than 20 seconds on a 28.8Kbs modem.
Industry standards say that in general people will not wait more that 20 seconds for a page to load. We suggest that you reduce your page size, or image sizes, or reduce the number of images used, in order to decrease the download time.
This was the main page their script pages are even worse. Dialup users still make up 50% of the web surfers, so its liking saying if your male don't shop here.
The sniping drives the new buyer who haven't figured it out away in disgust because they feel cheated and often again don't bother to figure it out just leave. Or scares the hell out of the new sellers because of no bids to end.
They have become so huge with so many categories and duplicates of categories that new users(buyers) find it overwhelming and leave often to never return. Its almost impossible to just browse now, you have to have specific catergories your looking for, so the casual browser no longer is making impulse buys.
So what you have ended up with seasoned Ebayers that specialize in a few areas sniping auctions to resale later with better descriptions, and placement or selling in their stores.
Final outcome less page views, less bids, lower prices, then throw sniping into the mix and it gets even worse.
posted on November 27, 2002 05:34:26 PM new
Agreed. The problem with ebay for the last 4 or 5 years is the supply and demand ratio always favors the buyers because the sellers have flooded the site with multiples of every thing under the sun and price competition, due largely to the large listing fees and oversupply, have lowered prices to very low levels.
Ebay makes money from sellers and not buyers so they have always promoted selling and not buying which has always been the wrong thing to do in my eyes. The sellers will increase in number if the make larger profits and have a better sell through rate so ebay can just promote buying and not selling and do well.
One of the very dumb ebay TV commercials was about a couple independently selling and buying a funky lamp. The lady supposedly unknowingly sold the lamp to her husband who thought his wife would like a mate to her funky lamp. How unbelievable is that? Plus it shows how easy it is to screw up either buying or selling on ebay!
posted on December 4, 2002 10:30:47 PM new
I am revisiting this thread because of this auction. These comments were posted here:
The problem with selling when there are snipers: the snipers many times have not been bidding till the last minute.
Let face it at a real auction part of the excitement is auction fever and human nature of not wanting to be beat, the sniper take this element out.
Again I disagree with you both sniping had nothing to do with getting a good price, they would have bid that amount anyways, you do lose all those last minute excitement of the auction bidders without a snipe program.
Okay, this auction was listed for 7 days. I feel that everyone had an equal chance to bid. Snipers drove the ending price up from $375 to $613.
posted on December 4, 2002 11:56:52 PM new
When I first signed up for ebay 5 years ago I bought one of the "How to sell on ebay" booklets for $5 and in it the seller said "there will be many times when you pray for a sniper bidder if your item has zero bids at the very end." It took me a few years to understand what he meant. If you have a few auction items and they have no bids at all until the last few moments of the auctions then any bids are better than no bids at all. As long as you list your auctions with the minimum amount of money you are willing to accept as the start amount you will welcome the snipers rather than having no bids and faced with relisting the auction.
In a way many bidders are proxy bidding via sniper software. That is a good way to not draw too much attention to the auction. If there is an auction item that you would dearly love to add to your collection a good way to bid the most money that you'd be willing to bid on the item either via sniping software or physicaly doing it in the last few moments of the auction. If several bidders do the same thing then you get these very high end prices in the last few minutes. These bidders were going to bid what they were going to bid anyway and simply chose to do it at the very end to avoid drawing in more competitive bids. That is smart bidding and not any nefarious or evil scheming.
posted on December 15, 2002 04:28:55 PM new
Actualy the real resaon I started the thread, wass to find out if anyone was using Ioffer and was it good. When I started the thread, I had not been using bargainandhagle much and was going to go back to it. I wondered if there were more sites with the same venue.
since Y got no answers to the question about Ioffer, obviously I asked the wrong question,or something.
posted on December 15, 2002 06:55:45 PM new
I tried ioffer and actually still have some items listed there only because it is free to list. But as of yet, it had been a total waste of time. I have yet to complete a sale there. Personally, I would experiment at many different sites to see if one of them happens to be your nitch site. If you find one, stick with it. For me it is ebay #1 and Yahoo #2 and the rest are dead in the water.
PS: Looking at the charts shown previously, can you tell when Ebay had their free listing days? I can.
posted on December 15, 2002 10:13:37 PM new
Or perhaps its someone fed up with being a nameless cog in a corporate greed machine that only cares about its bottom line so its royal court can dump stock at outrageous prices.
Ebay has become a prime example of corporate greed, a site that cares not about its members, the site is only concerned with announcing ever increasing profits while the sellers that built it get hosed, in the past four years it has not had any changes that have helped any member but instead has focused on changes that only boost share prices and courting corporate America. Let face it for a site with supposedly high end programmers it sucks, it is slow, their database structure is obsolete and yet they appear to do nothing about it. Fine for those on high speed but 1/2 the country is still on modems. They consistently lie and give half truths with only one agenda in site the almighty buck, but don't care if it filters down to the people who helped make it.
Here is the comparison of page load times for ebay and our site, me being a lowly
part time programmer:
Page File Sizes and Load Times U-1 Ebay
Average page Bytes U-1 33,000 Ebay 75,000
And Page Load times
28.8K Modem U-1 14.2 seconds Ebay 37.4 seconds
56K Modem U-1 9.91 seconds Ebay 24.3 seconds
All Tests Performed by Sitesolutions.com
If they cared in the least for their members it would be very simple to implement
these options into their site but do they - no. So Tooltimes as you continue to grovel at queen Megs feet, don't continue to ridicule those that have gotten totally fed up, and are looking for an alternative, who knows you might be looking for a new source of bananas once they have sucked all the life out of Ebay.
