"Ebay- Best Snipe? Worst lemon?" Topic

I'm interested in hearing peoples best snipes(last minute stealing bids) on ebay or their worst lemons. My best buy was some Highland Jacobites. I bought them last winter from some guys who used them for roleplaying over in Scotland. I ended up paying about $3.00 a figure and they look truly awesome. They are the best painted miniatures I have in my collection. My worst have been getting some true 25's when I was hoping for larger. I have learned to ask who the manufacturer is. Also a clue to the size is that people will not list the maker. I have found that for selling it is good to end in the evening or on a weekend day. My best snipes have come during the week and daytime or really late at night or early in the morning.

I once got a huge lot of necromunda figs for next to nothing but I cant remember if it was a snipe or not.

I do know that I do better with the off hours stuff as you stated.

Now, I have seen some brilliant snipes on my own auctions. This one guy nailed it at 2 seconds and he later mailed me saying he used an on line sniping service and was having dinner with friends as it occurred, LOL!

Some bugger outbid me with a few seconds to go on a box of original plastic GW Squats. I only want a handful - preferably unbuilt. Can anyone help?

My best buy was for a load of Harlequin miniatures - the guys had 30 odd blister packs to sell - and when I asked what he wanted for the whole lot - said he'd accept £1 a blister!! I got some great figures.
I can't stand sniping and don't do it myself.

If you put in your maximum bid, you can't get sniped. If another person is willing to bid higher, tough luck. The real sad thing is when I want something obscure, and only one other person on the planet wants it too, and a bidding war ensues for something that should be cheap.

I agree with mathias on the maximum bid thingy, although I have been outbid (via a snipe) on some rare items that I later decided I really wanted (ie - I've been buying a lot of rare OOP military books lately. Say someone puts up a book for $20. I decide I'd pay up to $100.00 for the book so that's my max bid. Then I end up losing the book to a snipe at $101.00. Would I'd have paid $102? Of course! Would I have paid $120? I don't know).

Of course, from a sellers point of view, the bidding war is what we want! When I sell stuff I'm mainly trying to get rid of it, not make a profit, so my start price is pretty low. I figure if it's a hot item it will get bid up. Some OOP games I've put up for auction have sold for $100's of dollars. Other, OOP games I've put up for auction (which I thought would end up with a good price) went for next to nothing. I feel the whole eBay thing is kind of a crap shoot - I'm sure that if I picked a different week to sell the item that went for next to nothing, I might have gotten big bucks for it.

As for sniping, I sometimes snipe on an item that's only had 1 low-ball bid on it all week. It may be that the initial bid was also that person's maximum bid (they may be "scattershooting" on a whole bunch of items in the hopes of getting something on the cheap) so I can come in and grab the item at the last second on the minimum bid + $1.00. If I were to bid too early, the initial bidder might have 2nd thoughts and decide the item is worth a few extra dollars.

Eh... I put up my max bid and walk away from it. If someone is going to pay more for it, they will, and I can usually find what I want again the following week. I have a friend who always overbids for stuff because he hangs on the auctions and gets involved in outbidding the competition, then he hates himself for it afterward.

The last time I bid on some game books I wanted, out of print stuff, I lost, and was kind of bummed, but the price went way over what I wanted to pay. So I mentioned the title I was looking for to a friend, to keep an eye out for because he buys a lot of used books from other gamers, and next thing I know I've got an armload of books and he's saying "here, take this crap, I hated this game". LOL, free was way better than Ebay.

I SWEAR by eBay for buying and selling! I can get GW miniatures at half price 90% of the time. Do I get them as soon as they hit the street? No but at the savings I get I can buy twice as many a month or two later. I use a little formula to gage the price I want to pay IE like 1.50 per foot mini 2.00 for mounted with mount etc. if the price goes over that I wont bid past that.. Oh and alwys factor in the shipping too!

My best snipe was avoiding Ebay. I tried to get Necromunda and found I was getting sniped all the time. Then I posted in the market place here, made a transaction for less than what it would have cost on ebay and I am quite quite happy.

I did get one thing off of ebay with help from a friend of mine. It was a set of original "Army of Darkness" figures. They were expensive but I desperately needed Ash and Henry the Red for my Army of Darkness scenario.

Dave Gamer hits the nail on the Head. I snipe not because I'd die without an item, but because I want to grab something for a cheaper price. Besides, what fun is it to bid your max, and then sit back and wait?

As far as best grabs (not necessarily a snipe), I picked up about 20 various minis (Chronopia, Rail Wars, Shockforce) for $7, which included 2 Rail Wars Hangin Judges (when they were OOP and going for $10+ each).

Biggest Lemon was a copy of Gygax's Chainmail rule set, that was (IMNSHO) horribly mis-graded. It looks like someone spilled coffee or soda on th ebook!

Patrick

I used to try and bid in increments and I would be constantly sniped and eventually outbid in the last few seconds of the auction.

Now if I decide I really want the item, I check my allowable budget and put down the maximum I'm willing to bid on an item. The great majority of the time I get the item.

Sometimes I get outbid still, but I know that I didn't want to pay anymore than I bid so I no longer feel as bad about losing out.

The good news is that if one checks E-bay once or twice a week and looks, even the most rare items eventually come up again. As long as one isn't too picky about the item that is. For instance, I'm willing to strip minis if I like them. I also don't mind stuff that someone else based. If I don't like the base, I'll carefully remove the old one and rebase it to my satisfaction.

My big story is the bookcase game Operation Badr about the Syrian assault on the Golan Heights. I really wanted a copy and bid $100.00 USD for it. In the last few seconds, a sniper outbid me at $100.01 USD. Luckily I had the item in a separate window that I was watching and bid $120.00 USD. Whoever that sniper was, he either has the world's fasted reflexes with 3 seconds remaining or one hack of a bidding program because I lost to a $120.01 USD bid. At first, I was pretty darn annoyed, but I was glad that I dedn;t pay $120.01 USd for a game that retailed at $16.95 USD if i remember correctly.

The irony of the situation is that in a rare case of the odds, another copy came up within the week that I won with a bid of $22.50 USD. Weird, huh?

I had been watching for the game and even programmed a special search for it using E-bay's special tools to notice that the game only came up about 2 to 3 times a year. Since that super-bid I have seen numerous copies come out of the woodwork. In fact, there are a few up for auction right now.

Strange but true!
Cheers,
Maksim-Smelchak.

I take back my best snipe...
the best one was a nick lund orc war chariot I got for $30, over half what the last one I bid on went for!

Ebay is really a science, if you research the item you are going to sell you can come up with a pretty good ball park of what its worth. The scary thing is, no matter how rare something is it shows up on ebay! Of course except the citadel orc riding wyvern from the pre warhammer days, I've been looking for this forever!

I always snipe my max bid in the last 10 seconds. I have found that if you place your max bid any earlier someone will always outbid you. I only track stuff that I really want and if it goes over what I want to pay I wait a day or two and another always comes up. I dont like to snipe but I have lost out on so many items that its the only way I bid now. As a seller I have seen an item I am selling shoot up to 3 times what it had been within 15 seconds of an auctions close and not from $1 to $3 but from $20 to $60. What a wild ride! I did receive a very nasty and threatening email from a fellow I outbid in England this way. He had never lost to a sniper before and thought it was very unfair. After I told him it was nothing personal and to watch out for it from now on he understood. See y'all on ebay, Rob.

Well, someone recently bought a painted Reaper miniature off me for $2.53 - and I paid $2.50 for it in the store... And it was nicely painted! Doh!

I think sniping is reprehensible and I don't use ebay anymore on account of it. Don't you people have anything better to do?

I put an old Panzerfaust game which I had assembled myself by gluing the paper map to heavy cardboard, gluing the counters the same and cutting them out. I was up front about it, wondered why I was wasting my tiome even listing it, and it was bid up into the $30 range, and the guy who "won" it loved it!

On the other hand, I have never been able to pick up a decent copy of Space Hulk. It must be like gold, with the commodity price published in the Wall Street Journal every day.

As a seller the item I most enjoyed selling was a $3.00 game that went for $100.00 because two guys got into a bidding war. I follow the maximum bid method - most of the items I bid on do not have many bidders (I've come to recognize the names). I pretty much use a fixed price per figure for my maximum bid. Sometimes it hurts when you lose out by 1 penny, but items do recur if you're patient. I also think most sniping is due to shrewd use of the bidding system (placing high bids with odd cents at the end is a popular one). I recently won an item on my high bid because I had placed it first. Another bidder eventually reached my high bid, but lost because he ran out of time in his pente-ante bidding. I figured he must have been annoyed when it ended. As for best deal and worse deal - I've bought enough items that it's hard to say. The worse deals are the ones where I look at the winning notice, look back at the item description, and then ask myself what the hell was I doing bidding on this stuff?!

I just got into Ebay this past month. I resisted for the longest time but I had problems waiting for deals at the Historicon, ColdWars, and FallIn flea markets. Besides, even at the Flea Markets everyone is trying to unload stuff marked up! Very few deals there.

I got a great deal recently on old 1/35 scale loose plastic samurai sprues. Almost 6 sets for the price of one.

My most frustrating buying moments are with those Solido tanks. Everyone seems to want one and I'm looking to save money not pay $30 for every tank.

And yes I "Snipe" to save money. I learned that quick when I started out by having a friend place bids and losing almost every auction. I can justify spending money on games to my wife if I "saved" money doing it! I just use her own shopping logic against her :)

I still don't really have a handle on it (less than 50 buys, no selling) but with the newness worn off, I generally feel relieved when I am outbid on something I've put in a maximum way over the starting. I didn't realize so many of the tactics I have tried were so common as to have names.

And now I can't reveal what I am after or someone here will use that against me. Aargh! Just another pleasant diversion (but feedback over 2000?)

Good hunting all ;)

I have sniped before (and probably will again), and I have been on the receiving end of it, too (and probably will again). The mental image is rather funny: two (or more) gamers/modelers/collectors, clad in their underwear (sorry for this mental image) at 12:30 a.m., with a wild gleam in their eyes, jaws set so in the "hunting mode," fingers deftly poised over the keyboard, reloading the auction page every 3 seconds to see if he/she has been outbid... on a second thought, scratch that "she," I truly think this is a male phenomenon.

Nope, not an exclusively male phenomenon. Buying wargame stuff might be, but I ran into a female worker at the post office who said she got her jollies out of sniping. Different strokes for different folks.

ebay has now been truly enshitified

1. Higher fees

Seller fees have steadily increased.
Promoted listings often feel less optional because many sellers believe they need them to remain visible.
Shipping and payment costs have risen.

2. Search has become less predictable – outright garbage

Instead of simply showing the best match, search results are influenced by sponsored listings, seller metrics, and eBay's algorithms.
Smaller sellers are harder to find.

3. Buyer protection outweighs seller protection

eBay has expanded buyer protections.
Many sellers believe fraudulent "item not received" or "not as described" claims are too easily decided in favor of buyers.
Returns have become easier for buyers but more expensive for sellers.

4. Mandatory managed payments

eBay moved everyone to its own payment system.
Some sellers liked the simplicity; others disliked delayed access to funds and reduced flexibility.

5. International Shipping

eBay International Shipping simplifies customs for many transactions, but when problems occur—as in the shipment you described—sellers often report they cannot get a clear explanation of what happened at the export hub. is now trash and wont get postage back when they return the package to yoiu

6. Customer service

Sellers frequently complain that support representatives have limited (read as none) visibility into internal shipping or algorithmic decisions.
Complex cases can be difficult to escalate.

7. Increased advertising

Search pages contain more promoted listings and sponsored content than they did years ago.

To be fair, eBay has also improved some things:

Authentication programs have reduced fraud in categories like sneakers, watches, and trading cards.
Seller protections have improved in some international shipping scenarios.

Why the criticism persists

Many long-time users feel that eBay has shifted from being:

"A marketplace connecting buyers and sellers"

to:

"A platform that increasingly optimizes for fees, advertising revenue, and automation, even when that frustrates experienced users."