Edit 01/10/2006:
Nope, I don’t know where SnipeVille has gone either. LotSnipe AuctionStealer is about the closest I could find. It allows 3 free snipes a week and snipes in the last 10 seconds.
PS – Here’s a handy tip for infrequent WordPress users: Don’t try to delete the only comment for a posting from the Manage Posts pages. The delete link is for the posting, not the comment. Click it and you’ll have to retrieve your posting from your backups (or Google Cache) and repost it, and that would be embarrassing… or so I’ve heard.
Being an eBay noob and having repeatedly been outbid at the last minute on items which I really had my heart set on, I had a quick cry on the shoulder of Dave who mentioned that the winners might be using “eBay snipers.” So after cleaning up my streaked mascara I decided to investigate these auction sharp-shooters.
Feeling a little dirty for even considering using one, I first checked out what eBay thinks of them. OK, so eBay’s proxy system gives you a better guarantee of a win if you state your absolute maximum price, fair enough, but you lose the element of surprise because the other bidder is immediately informed of your new (automatic) bid beating theirs and this usually starts a bidding war until you’re beaten. And I’m usually too late getting to the email from eBay advising me of this. Plus, this tit-for-tat bidding pushes the price up – enter dirty feeling again.
So anyway, noticing that my morals and conscience were getting in the way I of course bound and gagged them, and got back to searching.
You’ve got pretty much two choices:
- download a rifle (run software on your computer)
- hire a hitman
I decided to leave it to a professional and while there are plenty of contract auction killers out there, most of them charge you for a job – be it a percentage of each successful bid or a flat time- or transaction-based fee – whereas I wanted one that wouldn’t charge me for the hit.
And so I ended up in SnipeVille. I’d choose them just for the terrible name alone. 
“Yep, it’s about 6km along the M25 North from LandmineShire.”
Of course, there is a teensy bit of the “you get what you pay for” factor and the closest to auction end time that it’ll bid for you is 3 seconds whereas some not-free sites allow as close as the final second. But apparently they’ve got a 99% success rate and the interface is very slick. Free, effective and attractive; what more could you want? In fact, I’ve heard people say the same thing of me. Well, the “free” bit anyway. Not the rest. Actually, come to think of it they may have used the word “cheap.” I can’t be sure. They sound so similar. Who knows?
Anyway, poor old SnipeVille was crowded out of the first page of Google’s results for “free ebay sniper” by those that only offered a free trial, so I hope this post helps someone out there.
