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Finding Letters Wabler on 15 Nov 2006 05:16 pm

Ebay can be a cruel, terrible, horrible place to shop

I was trying to find letters to get this site started. So I thought, ah hell lets try ebay. To my excitement, I found hundreds of letters that I could purchase for use on my site!

So i bid.

And I waited…because out of the search query that I had, something like:

correspondance letters -book -”correspondance set” -”correspondance school” - course

The auctions at the time were like 4 days out.

So I watched and waited…

I was outbid on a couple, I looked into my wallet, and outbid them. And waited.

I am in college, and have alot of things going on with that and work, so I dont have all day to sit and watch my ebay auctions expire. So I was outbid and lost like 8 auctions.

Frustrated, I looked into the times when the last bid was placed … Out of the 8 auctions that I bid on, 6 were won in the last 5 seconds, 4 of which were won in the last 3.

So I put in another bid on a different auction, and considered the time it takes to bid:

  1. Click bid now
  2. load the page
  3. type in the amount to bid and submit
  4. load the page
  5. confirm that you in fact want to bid this amount
  6. find out if you are the winning bidder or not! - hooray!

Just the load times take at least 5 seconds, which means that these people had to start inside of the last 10-20 seconds of the auction. This means they planned to, or just happened to come across these auctions at the last second (literally).

Then I remembered, that back in the day a couple ebay sniper services popped up around the intarwebernet… I thought that ebay had stopped this foolishness and shananigan-ery by their 3-5 step process of confirmations, etc. I guess not.

I am really sick and tired of using ebay, only to be sniped at the last second, and I wonder if there is anything that I can do about it…???

Probably not I am assuming.

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