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Comment by cge | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, most purely online auctions, other than eBay, do work that way. Numerous auction houses, for example, including essentially all the major ones, have their auctions online now: when they are hybrid, that involves online live bidding where an online bid will cause the auctioneer in the room to keep the lot open for more bids; when they are "timed" or "online only", times are extended in some way on bids near the deadline. It does, in fact, work much better. There is still an advantage to bidding very late: there is no disadvantage, and it lowers bids in cases of irrational or imperfect opposing bidders. But it limits that process to something that can be done by hand.

eBay really seems to be the only auctioneer using the snipable process it uses.

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An alternative to ever extending the deadline is a Dutch auction model, where a bid consists of the maximum price you are willing to pay. It's a bit like integrating the snipping bot in eBay and allowing everyone to use it on fair terms.

For example, suppose the current price is $1 and the current winner is someone who bid $2 as their maximum bid ceiling. If I bid a $3 maximum, then I become the winner at a price of $2.

In this model, there is no need for snipping and those who honestly declare their maximum ceiling from the start are in no disadvantage compared to those who frequently update their bid, nor do they overpay.

Unless I’m missing something this is exactly how eBay works. You set a max bid and then it auto bids up to that amount so you can’t get sniped unless they bid higher than your max.

Not that this is perfect either, often it means you can push other people’s bids up to their max even though you have no intention of buying the item. I’ve seen it as a seller and felt bad for the buyers

Yes, almost all online auction sites (or even offline absentee bidding) work this way. You set your maximum price and the auction house bids for you. However, in any case, bidding early gives other bidders information on how much you're willing to bid and allows them to nibble their way up to your max. So bidding late is always advantageous, even when you're setting a max bid.

I've never quite understood why people get so upset about sniping on eBay. Anybody can snipe. That's just the best play. Any time I want to bid on something on eBay, I just set my max bid on the sniping tool instead of on eBay, and then forget about it.

This is exactly how eBay bidding works now. Sniping still works because your satisfaction with the outcome of an auction isn’t just determined by “I got the item below my price ceiling” but by _how much_ below my price ceiling I got the item.

Early bids make you commit to matching other bidders’ exploratory bids. You lose out on the (naive) dream of a “great deal”. Sniping (without paid-for bot assistance) is a costless way of not revealing your ceiling until the last moment (and it commits you to actually sticking to your ceiling because there isn’t time to rebid later).

If everyone bid rationally, this wouldn’t matter, but it’s very easy to convince yourself that you can stomach bidding just a little more than your ceiling just to win the item. This cuts two ways: last-minute bids prevent this behavior from others while also stopping it in yourself.

Ebay works like this too. But because sniping is still permitted, I like to bid 'uncommon' amounts, like $3.17, so if someone else tried to bid a max of $3.00 even at the last moment, the bid for the few cents more wins.

  commit ecfd9009-5bae4398b13645e14ec4ce25 (HEAD -> deal-with-snipers)
  Author: sunrunner
  Date:   Thu Jan 22 13:57:34 2026 +0000

      Update BidBot default bid cents amount to be 18 (was 16), to deal with pesky sniping strategies discovered on HN.

You described exactly how eBay works.

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