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Bulletproof your Account: How to Snipe Smarter and Start Winning More Auctions
posted: Sep 1 2015
This article describes the steps that all new snipers (and even experienced ones!) should know intimately. If you execute each of the steps below very carefully, and do not bleep over any steps with assumptions, then your success rate will go up, without question. These are the steps your opponents are taking to ensure their wins. Each condition below, if not met, may decrease the likelihood of a win.
eBay continues to crack down on security and give sellers more and more ways to make block bids, for mutual safety. Sellers can block buyers based on criteria, or eBay can randomly throw up interim pages that require your acceptance. These things defeat sniper programs.
1. Check executed snipe times.
Remember that our job is to place snipes, so the first thing to check is whether or not your snipe actually executed. Just go to your “Completed Snipes” tab to check to see if the snipes fired, because we list the actual snipe times there. We place 2-3 bids from different locations and so if you see these snipe times fire, it means we got the same result for all of the snipes.
2. Is your eBay information up to date?
We cannot do much on your behalf without the correct eBay password. You can verify it in BidSlammer Preferences; the link is in the upper-right hand corner of your snipe home page.
3. How secure is your eBay password, really?
eBay scores passwords. eBay is more stringent on bids which do not originate from your computer. Stated differently, eBay is more lenient on the password security if you bid from your own computer. If you are bidding through an outside computer, like one of ours, it can result in a random security step or “Captcha” box on login through which snipes cannot penetrate.
If you have an English (or other language) word in your password, change it at eBay right now. Example terrible passwords are: Bidding123, iheartauctions, 8fish4dinner, ThisIsATerrblePassword123, Bingo@home#!. Many customers insist these should be good enough passwords, but they are, in fact, not desireable — simply because they use English words or proper nouns.
We have found the best kinds of passwords are ones that substitute numbers for letters, with a symbol tossed in, such as “Auct!on@Lov3r”.
After changing the password at eBay, update it in BidSlammer Preferences; the link is in the upper-right hand corner of your snipe home page.
4. eBay’s Minimum Bid Increment
For a bid to register on eBay, the "minimum bid increment" must be added to the current price.
To avoid misses due to bid increment, make sure to "pad" your bid by as much as $5 to $100! More information is available at our link explaining eBay's minimum bid increment.
5. Proxy bids
Always bid as high as you are willing to pay. It is possible for snipes to be outbid at the moment they are placed by eBay's proxy bidding system. It applies to every bid ever placed on an auction in the history of eBay.
eBay only displays the minimum price needed to be fair to all buyers. If you bid $1000 on an item with a current price of $500, eBay will show the price to be $500 plus the bid increment, and keep your other $500 secret. If someone else bids $750, then their bid is registered at eBay, and they immediately receive a "you are outbid" message as soon as they click SUBMIT. This is called proxy bidding.
The error message page we receive looks like this:
6. Ensure three (3) PayPal measures are in place
Many sellers place a general block on anyone not meeting their requirements. So, there are three account measures you need to make before you snipe:
- Link your PayPal account and eBay account.
- Confirm your Primary Address at PayPal.
- Turn off your PayPal security key.
7. Are you using a PO Box?
Some sellers will not accept bids from buyers using PO Boxes.
8. Did you buy from the seller before?
We see this often. Sellers can only allow one purchase per customer. This is more common than you may think, and it results in the vague error message below.
Also, sellers can also just outright block you. On a few occasions, we’ve had customers write us with profanity, and then we find, not surprisingly, that their previous sellers blocked them outright.
9. Does your seller ship to your country?
Many foreign sellers do not ship to the US. Please double-check the auction description.
10. Do you have unpaid item strikes?
Many sellers block transactions to buyers with 2 or more unpaid item strike(s).
11. Be careful with Buy-it-Now auctions
eBay rejects bids for Buy-it-Now auctions when the bid was above or equal to the Buy-It-Now price. If you think about that, it makes sense, because eBay is preventing unnecessary overpayment.
You can still bid on the item. The item must be converted to an auction before it can be sniped, by placing a manual bid on the auction that is less than the Buy-it-Now price.
Also, someone could have just bought the item outright before it ended.
12. Did your seller end the item early?
The seller may have ended the listed early because the item may no longer be available, there was an error in the auction, or the seller wanted to end the auction and sell to the current highest bidder.
13. Bidding on tickets, guns, knives, cutlery, or cosmetics?
We cannot accept legal terms on your behalf.
Each of the named situations results in a special authorization to purchase these items from the seller, and produces a dialog requiring you to accept their terms.
Some of them, like cosmetics, require an age disclaimer dialog.
See the next item for examples of some of these error messages.
14. Consumer Recall and Export Restrictions
Accepting export regulations on behalf of someone else is a violation of United States law. 'Nuff said.
To get around this, you have to purchase one of their items manually and accept their terms first with the same eBay ID that you use with our service.
Here are some of the very lengthy messages we encounter:
15. Oh, there's more.
There are a few other situations we did not describe here. A full list of other possible situations you may encounter is on our Status Messages page.
Subscribe to this blog, and stay apprised of any new updates or status messages.
Good luck sniping!
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