Should you use ebay sniper software?

In a word, hell yes! - o.k. sorry, that's two words. There is some debate out there about it, but honestly I don't understand why.

Using an Ebay sniper solves a very important problem for the part time online business person who wants to buy products on Ebay to resell - without a sniper he will spend hours after work and into the morning waiting for auctions to end and trying to outbid others who are doing the same!! My girlfriend and I did this a couple of nights and we only won a couple of things in probably over 10 hours of work!!

This is not a doable business plan!!

Using some version of a sniper program, you can bid (at your leisure) on hundreds of products that will close within a few days. Then while you're sleeping, working, or playing the violin your sniper places your bids in the last few seconds of the auctions. This is a world of difference, eh?!

But I can hear you asking two questions: 1) But if I bid on each auction individually, I can try to get the lowest price, right? and 2) What if I win all of the auctions that I snipe? I don't have the money for that.

Good questions!

To answer the first question about trying to get the lowest price, let me explain a bit about how Ebay auctions work. When you make the current highest bid and win, you don't pay your bid amount, but rather the next increment up from whoever had the previous highest bid. Let me give an example.

If the current high bid on a pair of Levis is 10$ and the bid increment is $1.50, if you come along and bid $20, then the new current high bid will show up as $11.50 and if nobody else comes along that's how much you'll pay. Therefore there is no point in trying to bid a little bit more than the current high bid, because you don't really know who has bid much higher - plus you wasted all evening that you should have spent with your family or violin.

As for the second question you had about winning all the auctions you bid on and going bankrupt, there is a simple feature of a good sniper program that takes care of that - bid groups.

Here's how that works. Let's say you think you want to buy used jeans from people who are selling them in lots (multiple pairs) and then resell them individually. What you do is you create a bid group 'jeans' on your sniper program and you set a limit of how many bids you want to win, say '10'. Then you spend an hour bidding on 50 jeans lots in a relaxed manner, since you don't care if the auction ends in a couple of days.

Then while you're about your daily life your sniper makes your high bid in the last seconds on each auction until you win 10 auctions. Then it stops. You just won ten lots of jeans at the price you wanted (or probably lower due to the concept discussed above) without much hassle at all. Now just have a good time selling them.

There are two types of sniper programs: web based programs and software on your hard disc. I recommend web based solutions because your computer does not need to be on for it to be working. The down side of that is that you will need to give your Ebay username and password out for it to work. Please choose a reputable business partner to work with.

There are several, however one that makes the top of the list for most computer guru types is PowerSnipe, which has been around since 2003 and has made appearances in several publications including the Wall Street Journal and Time Magazine. I have also had some success with a free program, but it just doesn't have the credentials for me to feel comfortable recommending it at this point.