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Artists: Anti-Sniping Auction Rules Benefit You!
13 years ago
General
Artists who run auctions! I want you guys to know that I love you and I love bidding for your work, but you are cheating yourselves out of your well-deserved money if you don't include a simple anti-sniping rule in your auctions! This is a PSA for all of my slot/YCH/adoptable/whatever selling friends.
My claim: An auction that ends in a last-second bid robs you, the seller, of money.
Fix: Add this one simple rule to your auctions! "The auction ends when there have been no bids for at least 10 minutes after the close time."
Justification: The purpose of an auction is to find the person willing to pay you the most money for your product or service. If your current high-bidder is sniped at the last second, he has no chance to raise his bid in response. Even if he is willing to pay much more money than the sniper is, he is unable to do so. You've directly lost money!
Real auction sites like eBay use a proxy bid system which lets you set the maximum amount that you're willing to pay for something, and the system auto-raises your bids up to that amount in response to other bidders, which prevents sniping as long as you set your max bid truthfully. That can't happen in an auction run via a forum, like FA.
Having a late bid extend the auction time allows people to offer more money in response to other bidders, which is the way that auctions are supposed to work in the first place.
Imagine this scenario: You're running an auction for a YCH piece in a pose that I find very desirable. I have a little extra fun money laying around, and like the pose so much that I'm willing to pay up to $200 for it. The current bid is $50, so I kick it up to $80. Two days pass, and I'm spamming refresh on your auction posting as the final seconds tick down. Moments before the auction closes, someone bids $85, and I can't post in time to raise before the deadline. I'm still totally willing to get in a bidding war with the other party up to that $200 level, but the auction has been subverted by your strict adherence to the deadline. You're out $115 and I'm out an awesome piece. The only winner is the guy who cheated both of us! D:
Don't let this happen to us, my friends! Get the real amount that your work is able to fetch, not an artificially depressed pittance!
That is all. <3
My claim: An auction that ends in a last-second bid robs you, the seller, of money.
Fix: Add this one simple rule to your auctions! "The auction ends when there have been no bids for at least 10 minutes after the close time."
Justification: The purpose of an auction is to find the person willing to pay you the most money for your product or service. If your current high-bidder is sniped at the last second, he has no chance to raise his bid in response. Even if he is willing to pay much more money than the sniper is, he is unable to do so. You've directly lost money!
Real auction sites like eBay use a proxy bid system which lets you set the maximum amount that you're willing to pay for something, and the system auto-raises your bids up to that amount in response to other bidders, which prevents sniping as long as you set your max bid truthfully. That can't happen in an auction run via a forum, like FA.
Having a late bid extend the auction time allows people to offer more money in response to other bidders, which is the way that auctions are supposed to work in the first place.
Imagine this scenario: You're running an auction for a YCH piece in a pose that I find very desirable. I have a little extra fun money laying around, and like the pose so much that I'm willing to pay up to $200 for it. The current bid is $50, so I kick it up to $80. Two days pass, and I'm spamming refresh on your auction posting as the final seconds tick down. Moments before the auction closes, someone bids $85, and I can't post in time to raise before the deadline. I'm still totally willing to get in a bidding war with the other party up to that $200 level, but the auction has been subverted by your strict adherence to the deadline. You're out $115 and I'm out an awesome piece. The only winner is the guy who cheated both of us! D:
Don't let this happen to us, my friends! Get the real amount that your work is able to fetch, not an artificially depressed pittance!
That is all. <3
This action would give anyone who wanted to bid against you an extra ten minutes to do so. You would then have ten minutes to respond, and so would he, etc, until nobody had bid for a full ten minutes. At the end of that, congratulations, you've participated in a fair auction. My proposed rule seeks only to prevent last-second bids from being impossible to respond to by someone willing to bid higher.
As for the rest of what you said regarding being in to win, being a proper consumer, and the like... no kidding, pal. This journal is a suggestion to artists to modify their rules to prevent people with your agenda from artificially depressing the final auction price. It's not a journal asking snipers to refrain from sniping, because I know you won't. You can't stop people from trying to work the system, but you can change the system to limit the impact of common manipulations.
Everything else was me responding to your 'whatever helps you sleep at night' comment, like that's supposed to make me a bad person or something.