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Ebay texts defeated by bid-bots
THE INQ thought it was being very clever by testing out Ebay's text [SMS] alert service. Who needs to be right next to their computer when you can bid from a handset? Right? Wrong. A bid-bot beat us.
Often, the Ebay auction you're participating in ends at a very awkward hour. And we all know the trick of bidding at the last moment to ensure you win an item.
One solution is to set your reserve bid as high as you intend to go. But this can lead to a rival sniffing out your highest bit far too soon. So why not opt for the text alert service?
The Ebay Mobile service (to give it its correct name) can send your handset a variety of alerts, such as: - when a listing ends; when a bid is successful or unsuccessful; and, most importantly, when you've been outbid.
So the INQ signed up especially to receive the outbid alerts. Incidentally, you can only assign one mobile phone number to one account – not multiple accounts. The text alerts cost £0.12 or $0.25 each.
The great advantage to an outbid alert is that you can reply by text with a new bid to secure the item. Given that you can text a few characters [your new bid] much faster than going online, this seemed a great idea.
Incidentally, the text message contains the appropriate URL should you decide it would be a better idea to handle everything via the handset's browser. Naturally the URL is for the mobile-friendly version of Ebay.
Since this was a test, the INQ was actually sitting in front of a PC with a broadband connection just to be on the safe side.
What happened? Well, in a nutshell the INQ was outbid in the last three seconds – proving that no human was really doing the bidding. The other buyer must have been using a bid-bot (often referred to as snipe software).
Software houses such as Hammertap supply such apps, although the INQ was unable to find the supposedly freeware version of its bot.
The moral of the story is either to set your highest bid at the real maximum or get your own bid-bot. For normal opponents, however, Ebay Mobile is worth a shot. µ
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I use this gadget to help with my manual sniping: http://www.mtbroutes.com/timer.shtml
3 seconds from the end is easily doable.
I'm not sure how you jumped to the conclusion that it was a bid-bot that beat you - sure it's a possibility but there's no reason a human can't submit a bid immediately prior to the auction closing!?! Come on INQ, don't stoop to this level on slow news days.
I know that I've sat and manually bid in the last few seconds of an Auction - you don't need a bot to do that! Multiple bids in a few seconds might suggest a bot.
Seriously sms is te same as sending an email from the internet and they want to charge 25C for sending a fricking email....
Increasing the minimum bid raise beyond one cent might also help.
Just to clarify, HammerTap actually does not offer any auction sniping apps. HammerTap software is designed to help eBay sellers gather market research. They can use our software to find out the supply and demand for a product, the most profitable listing strategies, and to explore possible hot markets. There is a company called HammerSnipe that has a sniping tool, but we are not in any way affiliated with them.

Thank you,
Amy Kendall,
HammerTap
Increasing the minimum bid raise beyond one cent might also help.
You are confusing a selling tool with the always-free auto-bidder at www.esnipe.com
The basic problem is that ebay is not a real auction. In a call auction the bidding goes on until no one raises (and why would the seller not want more money?). Simply by having fixed time limits (a sap for large scale dealers), it warps the whole process, as you see. 
It has long been the case that you can make a low-ball bid just to try to get a bargain, but if you really want something, you have to snipe it.
Web based snipers are the way to go. I used to use auctionstealer but now I use http://www.gixen.com were you don't even have to sign up, you just log in with your ebay password and it snipes for you. The free version is only the last 10 seconds or something but this seems to work just fine. You can even do groups of auctions and it will bid until it wins one of them and then stop.

Though it is strange ebay don't make auctions continue until there have been not bids for a minute or too like real auctions.
Three seconds? Huh. I've timed it closely enough when manually entering a bid to pare the margin down to ONE second. I've beat sniperbots that bid with fourteen seconds to spare. You guys play enough video games to know how incredibly long fourteen whole seconds can be sometimes.
is not to bother with bloody e-bay. 

I needed bits to rebuild a laptop -- was shocked at the prices but still wasted hours working how to use paypal and checking bids -- got outbid at the last moment for a stupidly overpriced drive tray. 

Within a few weeks at a flea market I found a complete broken laptop of same model for less than the e-bay price for one silly component. 

A horrible user experience I vowed never to repeat.