For the life of me, I can’t understand why people enter bids in eBay auctions. Sure, I understand the ‘buy it now’ feature that is becoming more and more popular there, but when you bid on an item in advance, you help no one other than the seller. Your bid is binding, so you’d better not change your mind; you’ve immediately put yourself in a competition with other bidders; and you always face the risk of getting out-bid at the last minute, while you’re away from your computer.

So, I don’t bid. I snipe.

‘Sniping’ is the time-honored eBay tradition of entering a bid with just a few seconds left in an auction. The reason it’s so effective is that your rivals have no time to respond.  You win the auction — if you get that bid in under the wire.

There are several obvious problems with doing this manually — you have to be at your computer, your internet access must be working, there must not be any of a dozen other problems and you must time things just right. I don’t do any of that. I use esnipe, an online service, and pay a small fee per transaction. Trust me: Esnipe pays for itself many times over in auction savings.

Also, by using Esnipe, I don’t have to be at my computer when the auction closes. And if I change my mind about whether I want to purchase, I simply cancel the sniping command before it’s issued at the end of the auction.

I’m sniping some speakers right now — some quality refurb Polks straight from the factory, which has its own eBay store. I’ve written previously about refurbs, and buying the speakers this way might save me, oh, 60% over buying them from a glass-and-bricks store. We’ll see how it turns out.