Snipe tools for ebay etc

I have had several snipes prepared for ebay items over the past 24 hours and everyone has failed, for no apparent reason as the item has not even sold in several cases and clearly my bids have not been placed. The snipe just didn't happen and in the snipe log it just says "snipe in progress".

I use Goofbay. They have never been totally reliable but this is ridiculous. Can anyone recommend a more reliable sniping site?

 

I have used Esnipe for years and only on about 3 occasions has it let me down.I set it for the default 6 seconds.The only other reason I did not win was if someone else esniped the same max bid and they put there bid on esnipe before me.

 

http://www.jbidwatcher.com/
free and flawless ( so far ! ) No bells and whistles but it works fine

 

Thanks for this. I have just signed up to Auction Stealer. Is there a page which lists your current snipes, because i can't find one?

 

I have a feeling that the eBay tech team will be systematically blocking all these third party sites as and when they come across them, so most likely it will be a case of needing to regularly try new ones.

 

I've been using Goofbay for several years and there have been intermittent problems but it has always righted itself. I think they increase bidding activity so why would they block them? Certainly the snipe tools allows me to bid for more things than I otherwise would!

 

A couple of reasons.

Firstly, although eBay is currently the online auction site, it does have competitors so it needs to uphold its reputation. Imagine if say 50% of their users drifted away because they never won an auction because they were always gazumped at the last second by an automated bidder.

The second reason is about security. Website owners don't want 3rd party independent processes accessing their site without prior agreement. Every time any process interacts with a website (eBay in this case), it temporarily takes resources on their infrastructure. I wont bother with all the techy ins and outs but basically the techies do lots of sums, based on expected number of concurrent users, volume of data transfer that will generate etc etc and use those calculations to work out how much their gaffer needs to spend on hardware and connectivity infrastructure in order to serve all those users. Automated processes totally bust all those calculations, because anything automated can work hundreds or even thousands of times faster than a human, and they can replicate themselves over multiple computers etc, so there is just no practical way to plan for them. Some of these processes might be written with the most innocent of intentions, like bidding apps. Some might be malicious, launching a Distributed Denial of Service attack (one of a website owner's worst fears, where lots and lots of machines are programmed to gang up on your website and overwhelm it so that real users can't get access). So what you do is somewhere between your machines and the outside world, you have pieces of kit called firewalls and threat management gateways. It is the job of these types of things to control what requests your servers may be bothered with, blocking anything that might be malicious or that might simply overwhelm your kit, and allowing genuine requests.

The larger a website becomes, the more people will attack it. eBay is huge, so it will get attacked a lot. Its firewalls and TMGs seem to do a good job of keep it fairly safe for now, but that will only remain so as long as their techies keep right on top of everything. As soon as their server logs start showing a big pattern, lots of requests from the same source or with the same 'signature', they will block it just in case.

 

I had never heard of snipes?? what if the bidding suddenly went much higher than you wanted to go?

Val