No particular auction rule is necessarily good or bad. They just favour buyers over sellers, or perhaps certain buyers over others or certain sellers over others. What matters is keeping a balance. As a seller you might like to hold a GGG auction, but as a buyer I might not want to.

eBay on its own also does not support the problem this generates. If there are two of an item, closing within an hour, as is very often the case, the extension confuses things. The one planned to close later may close first, changing the dynamic of how bidders shift from one auction to the next after they lose. They could do work on this, however, and also support allowing you to change your max bid to anything at or above the current bid, which would help.

Realize as well that your proposal only stops one last-second bid. If there are two snipers, the first extends the auction, and the rest all bid in the last few seconds of the new final close. If you were talking infinite extension, that adds other complications — many sellers want closes to take place during their business hours etc.

Now I have seen other threads debate whether you can stop sniping, and they are quite detailed, and I’m not really after discussing that here. The different perspective I am trying to bring is that features, like sniping, which seem more favourable to one party than another are not necessarily wrong because they do that, they just change the balance.

As I note, I suspect 99% of the emotion over sniping comes from eBay’s system of “2nd place bidder’s price plus increment” which enfuraties 2nd place bidders who forget it to think they were beaten by just a dollar at the last second, which they feel would not happen in a GGG auction. I’ve felt the emotion myself until I realize what’s going on.

Proper eBay bidding involves quick research on completed items to find what range similar items have sold for, and coming up with your true price, somewhere in the low end of the range if looking for a deal, and in the high end or slightly above it if looking for a quick success. This generates an efficient market, which is overall good.

On rare items, with no comparable item history, research may not be possible, and a live human auction would make more sense, but that’s a tiny fraction of eBay’s auctions today.