I consider the sniping as an strategy (maybe because I love playing sniper on Wolfenstein ET)

1. First, locate your objective. I use to seek on my local site as well as an Ebay.com since I’ve found the search results are not always the same, getting more results on ebay.com

2. Read carefully the bid conditions. Shippping conditions, currency, your own score (some sellers ask it).

3. Then evaluate your costs. As an international buyer I firstly select advantage currency change, having in mind the currency change costs and the percentage for that change will charge my credit card company. Add shipping and insurance. I add this to the actual price so I can decide if an article is a bargain or not.

4. Once I have decided that something is interesting, I calculate it’s worth, let’s say AA.00. There is a casino roulette-player tip: “don’t play with the money you need”. So I establish the bid and set it into JBidWatcher.

5. An intelligent Bid will take in mind the actual price of the item, considering the automatic bids usually will increase in 0.50 increments. Let’s say actual price is XX.YY I place my snipe at AA.YY+0.52

6. There are more possiblities to get a succesful sniping against items that has no bids in the last 24 hours (better if they have no bids at all).

7. I set my sniping time at 3 seconds, giving succesful bids.

8. If you don’t win, keep on searching. Refine your queries. And try again.

“3. Then evaluate your costs. As an international buyer I firstly select advantage currency change..”

Looking specifically for local sellers means you can keep the cost down by picking the item up. This gives you a huge advantage when the item is large.

“4. Once I have decided that something is interesting, I calculate its worth, let’s say AA.00.”

lurking gives you another advantage – you can tell what price an item usually goes for. Then you can either bid low, but in the correct area and hope, or bid wildly outside and get lucky. I have got an item which normally goes at 10-15 at 3 before…

“5. An intelligent Bid will take in mind the actual price of the item, considering the automatic bids usually will increase in 0.50 increments.”

Hmm. You should not consider the auto price, but rather the maximum your opponent is likely to pick. They will be picking AA.YY+52. You must beat that…

“7. I set my sniping time at 3 seconds, giving succesful bids.”

I set mine at 6. I have had instances where my bid has been out by 2 seconds, so 3 seems a bit close if you have a glitch. I was once just outbid at the last minute, probably manually, when I set at 9 secs, so I think 6 is pretty indefensible. 8 would be pushing it…

Tactically, you do NOT want to be the LAST bidder, so 3 seconds is bad for this. You want to be the FIRST bidder who cannot be challenged. I have lost items through being the later bidder. Consider an item which is advertised 10.00, max bid 11.00 and which you think can be bought for 11.50. Another sniper thinks he can get it for 11.30. You should win, but if he snipes at 6 seconds to go he will raise the item to 11.30. Your bid of 11.50 at 3 seconds to go will then be rejected as not big enough, and you will loose, despite being willing to pay more. I have learned this the hard way….

Like a real sniper, you need to get EVERY aspect of your targeting right. Perhaps playing sniper on Wolfenstein ET is not the best practice for real life!