I’ve been outbid at the last second on eBay a large number of times. Sometimes, I got into bidding wars in the last minutes with other people, where we would each decide the item was worth a little more to us when we saw how much the other person wanted it. In fact, that’s worked to my advantage on several of the things I’ve sold on eBay; we dumped off our Harry Potter 5 audiobook set for more than we paid for it.
But more often, when I got outbid, it was someone who waited till the very last seconds, when it was too late for me to manually bid more. Most likely, it was sniping programs that did me in… programs that place a bid automatically in the last seconds of an auction. I found a quite good free sniper program, JBidWatcher, and I won my first auction with a snipe tonight while I was watching TV. For you eBay addicts, I highly recommended using the sniping method. Even if people think they put in their max bid, they often change their minds at the last second when they’re outbid; I know I do. So when you have a sniping program that bids automatically for you with 10 seconds left, you can save a lot of money from bid wars.