The petition has been pulled. They claim pressure from eBay and others. Sounds strange to me; why would anyone care about a petition like this enough to try to get it pulled?

I've noticed that all of these sites go out of their way to justify sniping and make it sound like a good thing. Then they use really stupid arguments like "if you just bid your maximum, you won't get sniped", when they, themselves, don't practice this strategy.

Here's why I think sniping is bad. If you need a widget and you go into a store and see it on the shelf, is there a price you will buy it at? Do you have in your mind that that item is worth $19.95 and if you see it on the shelf at $19.96 you won't buy it? This idea that everyone has a "price" is ludicrous. Anyone who's ever done online surveys knows that to be true. You can't decide your perfect price in five minutes or three days or whatever. You can decide some price you will buy something at with a given comfort level and bid that, but if you see the bid go up, you have to decide if the next level is within your comfort level. This is not "stupid bidders", as they are often called by the sniping supporters, this is normal human behavior. We are not binary animals, we are continuous creatures and what you will pay for a product is a sliding scale, where you trade off your desire and your expenditure of resources.

This can be bad, leading to bidding wars where people go deeper into, or beyond, their comfort zone. But, it also can allow someone who had no problem bidding $50 for an item the chance to decide that they are willing to pay $60. Now, you'll say "he should have bid $60 in the first place". Why? You don't do that at a live auction. $50 was easy, he knew he could pay that no problem. $60 took some thought. Why invest that emotion if the item does not exceed the $50 bid?

I'm a big supporter of auto-extend of auctions, where the auction is always extended some time past the last bid indefinately. The arguments against this approach mostly are in the "must close during business hours" or "sellers can't wait forever" type. Who really cares about business hours on eBay and sellers will wait as long as the price keeps going up. The other argument is that this disadvantages those who cannot be there at the end of the auction. So what? They still have the option of bidding higher as a proxy bid. They will only stay to the end if they are willing to invade that comfort zone and that will only help the seller. You'll say "but if they are willing to invade the comfort zone, why don't they just bid higher?" Again, stupid argument. How much higher? Maybe someone will bid $51 and they think, "okay, I'll do $52" and that's reasonable, but someone bids $60 and they have to decide then if it's worth $61 to them. Either way, they get the chance to make these decisions as people, not as the binary machine that the sniper supporters always claim they should be, but obviously are not, themselves. Now, they will respond that they only get one chance, so it must be their highest bid. I have to ask: does the current price influence your bidding at all? Would you bid the same if eBay just put the sniping into the system and didn't show any bids at all, effectively a sealed bid system? They clearly could do that.

I could come up with other arguments against sniping such as the loss of entertainment value in watching prices. What surprises me about the sniping FAQ pages is how one-sided they are. They only refute arguments against sniping, and never acknowledge any arguments against it. And, yes, I use eSnipe. I have to if I want to win an auction because those snipers don't know what their maximum price is any more than I do, so if I show my bid of $50, they then get a chance to decide if they will big $51, whereas if I snipe $50, they may have been very comfortable with $45 and I win the auction. Sad that it's not in the spirit of an auction: "what are you willing to pay", anymore.

Charles