Volumes and volumes of economics literature have been written about auction behavior and outcomes. The Cliff Notes version is that anyone who says that any particular strategy (other than bidding the most money) will win you the lot, or that any particular strategy will win you the lot at a lower price than other strategies, is wrong.
I don’t bid on things that already have bids, so that strategy works against me.
+1. And if you embrace this reality, you can make these auctions a lot more convenient for yourself. Instead of feverishly hitting refresh at 5:59 p.m. on Sunday or whenever, just enter the most you are willing to pay for the item at your convenience. If you would have entered another higher bid at the last second because of a sniper, you should have made that higher bid amount your maximum bid in the first place.
Plus, in Winebid, you’re actually better off bidding earlier – you’ll probably save yourself a $5 or $10 “step” per bottle you win, which adds up.
Lastly, we all have way too much wine. When you “lose” an auction, it’s usually just as well – you got to have the fun of finding and shopping without the expense of buying or adding another clump of bottles to your overtaxed storage. I don’t think any of the bottles I lost on winebid over the years has ever really ended up hurting me.
That’s what I do. I enter my max bid and forget about it. Going to auctions or watching at the deadline just costs me money.
Sorry to introduce a bit of a drift, but before making ANY bid, check other prices available. I looked at a bottle of Textbook 2012 Cab currently on WB and find it offered for a starting bid of $35. K&L has it offered for $19.99. I have run into this before, not a lot, but enough to make me wary of jumping onto bidding without doing some price checking first.
Same here. You are guaranteed to win the wine if it comes in at or below your maximum bid
The argument for sniping is that bidding early demonstrates an interest in the wine, which might attract the attention of other people who otherwise would not have bid. Basically, a bid is a public vote of confidence in a particular good, which may make it more desirable in the eyes of others.
For example, let’s say John Smith is a wine expert who is known for finding great wine at a great price. And let’s say he has a known WineBid account. Let’s say there are 1000 bottles with no action on them, and suddenly Mr. Smith bids early on 20 of them. It’s surely in the best interests of other wine buyers who are not experts to be following Mr. Smith’s actions in the hope of taking advantage of his knowledge by attempting to outbid him slightly. Therefore it is always in Mr. Smith’s best interest to snipe.
If you assume (I) Mr Smith is identifiable, (II) all of the other potential bidders on the same lots as Mr Smith don’t know dick about wine and (III) no other potential bidder would bid on the wine but for Mr Smith’s bid. None of these (with the possible exception of (I) if Mr Smith is an idiot) seem plausible to me
It really comes down to personal preference on how one wishes to bid. There are very good arguments on both sides but for me I have little to no desire for sniping. I’ve done it, and been successful, but the time it takes and the stress that results is not worth it. I’d rather bid early, use the autobid, spend dinnertime with my family on Sunday eve, win some, lose some, but come away happy with good wine, regardless.
So this isn’t a thread on cooked Winebid wines?
![[smileyvault-ban.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/4/426cc97ad8dd530c8304b0918ca75ff841d4d950.gif "[smileyvault-ban.gif]")
It all seems very plausible to me. You don’t really need to know that Mr. Smith is a wine expert whose WineBid username is Foobar, you just need to know that WineBid user Foobar has bought a lot of wines on the site in the past that, upon further research, have chosen to be wise buys. Anyone who purchases on the site regularly becomes familiar with certain usernames.
But even if you don’t know that, just from casual browsing it’s apparent that the overwhelming majority of wines on the site do not acquire bids until very shortly before closing, and even then, I don’t think more than half sell in a given week. The fact that a bid has been made upon a particular wine by anyone in such circumstances is a vote of confidence, assuming that most people with the money to play this game aren’t morons.
In summary, there is absolutely no disincentive to sniping, aside from the mere inconvenience of it (I’m not sure if there are autosniping tools for WineBid like there are for eBay; maybe no public tools, but almost certainly some are being used in private).
It’s the $5 (and $10) bid increments on winebid that make autobid such a powerful tool. Others are generally aware of the market price and general value of a wine, too. So, with a wine with an opening bid of $30 that you’re willing to bid $40 for, an auto bid of $40 yields 4 possible results: great deal, good deal, fair price, no thanks.
Sure, sniping there could work. It wins a wine away from someone who wasn’t smart enough to autobid.
Then again, maybe all they were willing to pay is what they bid, so you’re actually paying more than you could’ve gotten it for - but feeling all smart and stuff.
+1 here. Figure out your high water mark early, put in an opening or lower ball bid and then autobid your top end and don’t sweat getting outbid. Accept what happens. Makes your life easier and happier.
Note to the world of people still bidding at monthly online Acker auctions who “snipe” during the last 30 seconds of a two-week auction: It’s not helping you. It auto-extends the item for an extra 15 minutes, and pretty much all you’re doing is inducing a lot of eye-rolling. Congratulations; you snuck in there and got 'em at the last minute! Except you didn’t, and now the lot is set aside for extended bidding when your competition has more financial flexibility because they just lost some other lots or at least know their total financial exposure. Nice work.
I can only imagine you think this is a successful strategy because you end up winning lots. In reality, you’re winning the lots because most of us already put in our max bids long ago, because we’ve figured out that sniping on Acker is pointless. But carry on. When you pseudo-snipe, you always make life easier for your competition—which, if you’re bidding on old Sauternes, might be me!
I snipe every chance I get, both on WineBid and EBay. If on the former, and I recognize the other bidder or if he is listed here on this site as a winebid bidder, I won’t snipe out of respect.
There is nothing wrong with it and it is not 1) illegal and 2) unethical.
I snipe because I want the item for the lowest possible price. What is wrong with that? When I play by the whiners rules, I get sniped or worse yet, a midweek bidding war can ensue that brings the price way up and out of my want-zone anymore; this happened recently with Littorai bottles. Oh, believe me, the buyer paid dearly. I was relentless and toward the end just outright pissed. That’s what playing by the good boys rules gets you. I was early and bidder number one but it meant nada.
No strategy work 100% one hundred percent of the time. None. It’s all ‘good’. 
Nothing wrong with sniping - part of the game. Whoever snipes me and “wins” gets the bottle, but I had no interest at that price. I take comfort in knowing that I’ve pushed them higher than they might otherwise have gone 
From my experience and given the blocks of price at which winebid moves, I’m going to guess that you’d end up spending slightly less over time for the same set of wines by making your bids as early as possible in the week rather than sniping at the last second. Many items end up sold to the first bidder, and if you’re the first or at least earlier, you may get it $5-10 cheaper than if you bid with a minute to go. And I really don’t think bid activity spurs interest on winebid – e.g. I don’t think someone out there is going to bid more aggressively on your bottle because he sees you have bid on it on Monday. More likely the opposite, he’ll just look elsewhere.
No evidence to back that up, just my random opinion from years of winebid activity.
I hate to let secrets out of the bag, but people here are talking about sniping and they have no idea what it means.
You don’t sit and wait to see what happens. There is an robotic application that bids for you with as little a 3 seconds left to the auction end. You set a maximum and it bids up to your maximum, but only as needed. It is like setting your maximum bid without placing a bid until there is virtually no time left. It isn’t perfect if the end time floats as there are more bids. But if there is a fixed cut off time, it can’t be beat.
OK - new toys for some. ![[oops.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/1/1f129ddad071ffe5db6c99817c3cab666035a70a.gif "oops"){kind=small}
Jim, I’m not sure I understand your post. To me, sniping is waiting until the last few minutes of the auction and placing a bid with the idea that other bidders won’t have time to counteract. I think we are all fully aware that autobid will increase your bid for you if you place your bid higher than one increment from the current claim.
Am I missing something?
Hope you were not speaking of I. I wrote the book on sniping EBAY.
I have bid successfully with 3 seconds left. I once had software on my computer to do it for me with EBAY. So much more fun if you are around. Yesterday’s Paul McCartney book sniped for my wife with 4 second left and yes, set your highest as you never know who else is doing electronic bidding. I once won an auction for .05c more.