ON THE CHEAP/ LEARN HOW TO USE EBAY
Rich Laden, Kamon Simpson, Dave Philipps, The Gazette
You can get nearly anything on eBay, from a beach house in the Bahamas to a poltergeist in a jar. If you’re lucky, you can even get a good deal, but first you have to become a sniper.
A sniper looks for bargains and then barges into an online auction at the last minute and makes a higher bid. Here’s how it works.
Let’s say you decide you can’t live without the classic David Hasselhoff album “Crazy About You.”
Through eBay’s online auctions, you can bid on the CD as often as you like during a specific auction time of three to 10 days.
If you are the highest bidder at the end of that time, the CD is yours.
Imagine three days are left until the auction ends. If you bid now, everyone else online could out-bid you and drive up the price. But if you wait until the last minute, you might get that CD for a steal.
It may not seem fair, but everyone else is doing it, so let’s get started. Here are four steps to successful sniping.
1. Decide how much the David Hasselhoff CD is worth. If you slip in at the last minute and bid $50, you didn’t get a deal.
2. Monitor the CD, or any other item, so you know when the auction will end.
3. Make your maximum bid in the last five seconds.
4. To save time, use an automatic sniping service like Auctionstealer.com or Bidnapper.com that will automatically snipe auctions of your choice at the last possible moment. Many of them have free trial memberships.
Copyright 2003
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.
