Sellers don't get the full value of the highest bidder. Realize that? (I just bid $120 on something and got it for $99. Sellers-- listen up).
Last minute gunfights appeal to some, but for the buyer who has searched for an item, only to see it slip away as someone else mines THEIR bids, it can be frustrating.
All buyers are thus driven to following the last five minutes of auctions they are interested in-- highly inconvenient.
The use of a bot alleviates that, yes; but you still are sniping... a high-powered-rifle sniper, hiding in the tree. Isn't it the least bit uncomfortable to know that you are wasting the time of all those others who are up bleary-eyed at 2am, trying to complete THEIR collections, usually at 56K baud? (77% of USA is still not on broadband...)
The seller is going through 3 or 5 or 7 DAYS of nail-biting while few show a most feeble interest. WHY? Because eBay's setup is skewed to favor buyers who wait till the last moments (someone said, "early bidders never win", and there is some truth to that, precisely because of the way eBay's auctions are structured.)
The basic idea of ANY transaction is that I as a buyer should give my value and the seller give his; that we are both satisfied when done. Of course, auctions are supposed to net the seller with the MOST he could have gotten for his item, the highest offer setting the market's value. This doesn't exactly happen on eBay though. Auctions are ALSO supposed to benefit the buyer by allowing him to EVENLY compete with others to exact a fair and considered market price from all who participate. But on eBay, the other buyers are only half the danger; the clock presents another.
Someone (I really forget who, stand up and take credit) once suggested an auction structure I am enthusiastic over. It retains all that eBay is while eliminating the advantage of sniping as a strategy. It makes early SERIOUS bidding useful because you may choose to make your bid high enough that no one else considers it worth challenging, then or with ten seconds to go. Yet it still holds the excitement of an auction for both buyer and seller.
Basically, all that is required is that the eBay clock for an auction is dynamically reset to five minutes left, any time a higher bid is made WITH five minutes or left on the auction. So if Chris uses his bot at nine seconds to go, the auction ends five minutes later than that, unless WITHIN that five minutes, someone else (or even Chris or his bot) chooses to make a higher bid, in which case the clock is reset again, etc.
Now for the seller, potentially stretching the auction say, an hour (*that would be 12 or MORE new high bids*) would be worth any additional money netted.
For the buyer, he would get the item when his bid went unchallenged in the last last last five minutes. But he could spend the time considering whether it was worth more to him than it is worth to anyone else. Like ye old auctions, the call of "Going... GOING... Gone!"
Sniping would be less fruitful, and auction prices would tend to reflect more considered prices from the get-go.
Your bot would not be needed to time-shift unless you wanted to be one of the ones dragging the price up to seller's nirvana; putting the price at a value that no one else beats... that is the name of the game under this system, and it can be done earlier, even days earlier. Guys who don't live in DSL-land could still react to the "one dollar more" syndrome, if they chose to.
The secret weapon of sniping with "the bomb"-- entering a $10000 bid on a $350 item, knowing that, in the last seconds, nobody will match that, and you'll get it, at worst, one buck higher than other bidders... that will virtually end because there's a very REAL risk that a shill will make you EAT a considerable portion of your bomb. While it could happen today, the risk would be MUCH greater under a dynamically-timed system.
I would recommend this system to eBay; I would also hope they did better verification and pre-screening of registered "users"; getting eBay identities or changing them should be more tied to reality: an ID could be confirmed by tying it to a hard mailing address: you keep your "sunglasses" until you respond with a verification code MAILED to your residence. A Driver's License or Social Security number (in those areas where it is available) could ALSO enable eBay to cross check the residence to the person. A checkmark might appear instead of sunglasses to show that eBay has SOMEHOW successfully corroborated the identity of the user...
You should be able to change your ID, but with the following change: your OLD ID always appears (with the dates you used it) on your feedback stats page.
Changes to eBay, I know, might be hard to accomplish. But sellers and buyers BOTH would benefit from a more even-handed structure.
In the meantime, maybe my bot will HAVE to battle your bot, and may the best bot win... ;-/
LOL... or maybe eBay will offer its OWN bots...