Interesting- I had never seen the snipe sites mentioned above. I have bought and sold 43 instruments on ebay under the same name as here and everywhere else and it is interesting to me to see how the sniping has affected buying and selling. It used to be that when selling you would see the price slowly climb day after day, then a small rush at the end bumping the price perhaps another 15% when the final bid came in.
Ebay used to send emails encouraging me to drop the price if I had a listing with little or no action. Nowadays - ok I haven't sold anything in the last year- things sit with 2-3 low bids on them for a week, then get the sniping flurry at the end, so you never know how things are going to go until after it's over. The sniping flurry will often double the price. I sold a Rigel mandolin that was sitting at $1800 for a week- ended at $4400 and all of the increase was in the last 30 seconds.
I often put in a low bid on instruments just to put them in "my ebay" file to track them.
If an item really interests me a lot I'll do a search- looking for completed items only- that is just like what I want. That way I can find recent selling prices and get a very good idea of what to bid if I want the item.
Then I make one bid, my maximum that I am willing to pay, and forget about it. Sometimes I win, often I lose- but if I lose, I lose to someone who is paying more than I want to so I don't feel bad. If you are bidding on a fairly common Guild model they are always there, usually 4-5 a week so give yourself a few months to find the right one and let a few of'em go.
I have bid $1250 on an instrument going for $200 when I made my bid. I knew it was going to go somewhere around what I bid and I just don't want to get caught up in auction fever. Late sniping drove the bidding furiously up to $1100 when my bid prevailed and I got a good deal.
Snipe away, it means nothing to me.
