The First Question eBay Sniper Bidding Services Get Asked

Do you place the bid? Or does the eBay sniper?

A classic question of eBay sniping services is this: will you bid just a dollar more if someone outbids me? The answer of course is that responsbility for bidding amount lies with eBay, not the sniping service. Because remember: when you join the sniping service, you give it your eBay password and user ID. Then place your bid with the auction sniper (eSnipe! recommended).

Ready for eBay sniping? Set... Go!

At that point it simply waits, holding your bid until the last possible moment (typically bidding 10 seconds to 1 minute before the auction ends). And then it logs in (as you) at blinding speed, normally far faster than you could possibly hope if the program were running on your home computer (because the sniping services are hosted in professional facilities with very high speed connections much closer to the Internet backbones than your house), and places the bid exactly as if it were a superhero you.

Or is eBay sniping handled by a Superhero?

(Bidman, faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a Windows machine on a neighborhood net connection! Or maybe just eSnipe). So Superhero Bidding Man has your ID and password at the ready. At that point the standard eBay proxy bidding mechanism comes into play. That means eBay, not the eBay sniping mechanism, keeps the bid as low as possible while still ensuring you're the highest bidder.

When Bidding is Just a Touch Too Low for the eBay Sniping Pro

It can of course do nothing about bids that are simply too low There's nothing a proxy bid mechanism can do about that. Back to the original question: will you bid just a dollar more if someone outbids me? The answer then is painfully obvious: bid the highest possible amount you're willing to go, because the sniping services can't read your mind and just extend the bid a bit more than you said.