Sniping tools for winning online auctions

If you are new to bidding on auctions on the Internet, you may be wondering how on Earth someone outbid you just seconds before the auction closed and took away that item which you had your mind set on. This is a very likely case of auction sniping, which essentially entails monitoring a timed online auction and placing a bid at the last possible moment to secure the deal.

Auction sniping can be done either manually or through the use of software. Naturally, using software greatly increases the precision with which you can snipe the auction, since it is not susceptible to human error. Some people who take auction sniping very seriously even choose not to use their own computer to snipe a bid, preferring instead to use an online service to do it, to decrease the chances of failure.

Some people consider this to be an unfair technique, especially if it is done through an automated way with the aid of software. Bidding websites such as Yahoo! Auctions and TradeMe circumvent this technique by automatically extending the deadline by a few minutes if a bid is placed in the last seconds to allow other bidders a fair chance to react.

There are also some online auction sites which utilize the Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) system to deter people from placing bids using automated techniques. This requires the user to decipher a picture showing distorted text and to type the deciphered text into a text box before placing a bid.

Nonetheless, there are many online auction websites such as eBay which do not prevent their users from using these techniques to secure bids. Therefore, many, if not most people who win bids on eBay are likely to have used a bid sniper. In this article we shall investigate some of the popular auction sniping tools available which will greatly increase your chances on winning a bid on eBay.

Bidnapper (http://www.bidnapper.com) is an online auction sniping service optimized to work on most eBay websites. This service has been around for the past 6 years, and has since helped thousands of people win their auctions. To get started with this website, you will have to choose either a one, three, six or twelve month membership. The cost of membership can vary from $7.90 per month to $59.99 a year for an unlimited number of bids.

AuctionBlitz (http://www.auctionblitz.com) is another online bid sniping service which has similar features and is built with the same intention as other websites. It has successfully placed over 16 million bids as of February 2007. However, one well-thought-of feature which sets it apart from its competition is something called Bid Bin. This feature will automatically place bids on similar items one after the other until it is able to secure a winning bid. What makes this technique interesting is that it looks beyond just sniping one auction bid, and will attempt to secure a winning bid, even if it means bidding on different bids offering the same item.

If you exclusively use eBay, you may also find their Bid Assistant tool to be rather useful in helping you to secure your bid. No doubt the various auction sniping tools on the Internet has driven eBay to offer one of their own. One clear advantage of using Bid Assistant is that since it is operated by eBay itself, the chance of failure is extremely low. External auction sniping tools or third party software simply cannot match this guarantee.

The other thing to consider is that since online auction sniping services place the bids on your behalf, you will naturally need to provide your username and password. There is certainly a certain amount of risk involved in disclosing this information to third parties, even if it is a reputable auction sniping service. This is even reiterated in eBay’s user policy. This is a strong reason for many people to opt for Bid Assistant, since it is operated by eBay and already has access to the secure servers which stores your critical data.

At the end of the day, No matter which auction sniping tool you decide to use, you will need to evaluate it thoroughly before deciding to use it. With enough experimentation, you will be able to find the right tool which will enable you win almost every bid.