Chills, it makes all the common sense in the world to me to wait and bid at the last second. Why let the world know you want the high demand item by placing a bid early? It only drives up the price and creates a bidding frenzy.
Of course, you should feel free to maintain your opinion on this. It will always insure I win the bid on whatever we are both bidding on (unless you have put a top price in that is simply too far above the value of the item and I'm unwilling to pay for it).
The bottom line is that the snipers who bid in the last seconds win the auction 9 times out of 10. I want to be an auction winner, so I always snipe whenever possible.
The single exception to my strategy: The wifey wanted a set of four Christian Dior coffee mugs that are a rare piece of a discontinued pattern she is collecting (a very high demand item, believe it or not). It was her birthday in a couple of weeks and I was not going to lose this auction, so I jammed $500 into the eBay auction the morning it closed because I knew no other idiot would ever bid $125 per coffee mug. That was a huge risk on my part, but I knew there was a threshold somewhere for everyone and I would be well above it... the wife's birthday was worth it to me, even if I had to admit to her I paid 4x the retail price when they were sold new five or ten years ago and three times their book value.
The auction closed at $196.61 or something like that, which is $50 a mug (one would have thought these mugs were designed and sold by a Porsche parts counter, huh?)
Had I been there for the close of the auction, I'd have seen it going toward this amount and jammed $256.61 in there and gotten them for the same price, but not running the risk that someone with an attitude might keep jamming another price in there to see where my ceiling was.
Ohio, when I am not available at the last seconds of an auction's closing, I have a buddy or my wife snipe stuff for me at the last minute with my name and password. There are also sniping services on the internet, but you have to pay their fees in advance or pay a percentage of the item's final bid if you are the winner. I have also set an alarm clock for 3 am to snipe an auction. I'll wake up for 5 minutes to get a great deal on something for the Boxster!
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