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have your price in mind and at the very last second put it in, outbidding the higest bidder by say 1 or 2p if you can"
I don't see how that would work?
If you are the last person to bid even if you bid a million pounds (by way of a silly example) your proxy bid will only rise to £1 (depending on the price the auction has reached) above the highest proxy bid. So you'll pay £1 more than whatever anyone else's highest bid is. If its worth £50 to you bid that ... if the next highest bidder only bids £40 you'll get it for £41
eBay forces you to bid £1 higher than the currently shown highest bid.
So if the current bid is, say, £10 you have to bid at least £11. If the current highest bidder has a proxy bid of, say, £20 you will immediately show as outbid and the current bid will rise to £12.
You can rebid at £13, be outbid again, and continue on until you get to £21 and then you will be the highest bidder. If you try to do that close to the end of the auction you'll run out of time!
You can bid 1p over the quid, and then when the price gets to £19 if you then bid £20.01p you will indeed have outbid the highest bigger by 1p. But if they are playing the same game you will have to bid £21.01 to secure it ... whereas a £21 bid would have saved you a penny - so you are as likely to win by a penny as lose by one.
I definitely agree that bidding at the last moment is the best approach. That is because people don't just place proxy bids and walk away. They try £10, then £20 and so on ... and that drives the price up.
If everyone bid in the last second it would go to the person with the highest bid, as everyone would only be able to make one bid.
Not really in eBay's best interest though is it?
getting punters exciting by the auction, and bidding beyond their intended maximum is better for the auction business. Hence why auctions start at 1p or 99p - relying on the price being "talked up" by people thinking they might win the auction at that price, the reality is that there are enough people using eBay that those sorts of bargains don't happen (or not often) - and unscrupulous people will have a mate place a Shill bid for the "reserve" price, just-in-case
I bid using a "Sniping" software program. I put the auction number into that, enter my maximum bid, and then forget about it. It bids in the last few seconds of the auction, and I either win or not. But in the meantime my bid has not been sitting on eBay tempting people to bid beyond their maximum.
(Sniping software also has the benefit that you can bid on multiple auctions, but as soon as any one of them is successful all further related auction bids are not bid. I've used that to buy a number of things that occur frequently on eBay, but I wasn't in a hurry and wanted a rock bottom price - sooner or later an auction will come along where fewer people bid, and then a bargain is yours for the Sniping!)
I bought the sniping software I use on eBay