I am familiar with the debates, and posted this article because — I hope I was being very clear — the element many people seem to missin the debate is that it doesn’t matter whether it’s good or bad from any party’s perspective, just does it provide the right balance?

All the details in the debate come down to one question, does it work? If people feel it works, then it is benefiting them, and probably acting to the detriment of somebody else. If it doesn’t work it’s a waste of time to talk about it. But that’s fine. There are supposed to be strategies that benfit sides. Again, all that matters is if a good balance is obtained.

There are various advantages cited to sniping, all of them confer some benefit to the sniper over somebody else (either seller or other bidders.) My point is, there is not just one party to be pleased in auctions, but serveral.

Thinking off the top of my head, I know an easy way eBay could be rid of sniping if it wanted to, which makes me think it doesn’t want to: No proxy bidding in the last several minutes of an auction. (Proxies could be placed before this limit and would work after the limit. However, any bids after the limit would be taken as full amount bids, if you bid $100 you would pay $100 even if the 2nd place bidder bid $50.)

This might inspire software to try to do rounds of bidding over those minutes, creating quite a bit of traffic, but it could never work very well because each round would take a certain amount of time to have the results tested, and eBay could even control this time.

To get really dramatic, they could also allow just one final bid, with no proxy, in the last couple of minutes. Ie. if you want to bid then, bid your real price once and pay it.

“Snipers” would enter their true high bid just before the proxy window closes. Only live, incremental bidders would participate in the final minutes.

But I don’t think this is needed. It might make a bit more money for sellers, with higher bids from incremental bidders who otherwise were shut out from their true max. At a cost to buyers, of course.