Personally, I don't know if having an open ended format would really change anything for the sellers. While it might do an end to sniping since a sniper knows that he will extend the end of bidding the reality will still be based on the interest in the item and what people are willing to pay for an item and the browsing habits of the potential buyers. If people browse the last minute listings or the "Ending Today" listings they might still be bidding toward the ends of the auctions.

There are a couple issues that I put into my replies here. First was sniping and the other was the incremental bidding by people who are trying to influence the end price of an auction , say a sabateur or a shill, or bidders who don't understand how proxy bidding really works. For most people who understand eBay bidding we do put in honest bids even though we might hold back a little for a last minute reply for a reconsideration or to defend from some of the above mentioned bidders. Even those who snipe, I would guess, put in an honest bid of what they would be willing to pay, in the end. They know that they aren't the only snipers and if they want an item they still need to win among all the other last minute bidders. Thus, when you think of it, the system as it exists might be better for the sellers in that it forces those last minute bidders to think seriously about their bids as that might be their only bid since they are not allowing themselves a lot of time to rebid if someone outbids them. When several people set their sniping services or programs and bid in the last moment you have all those bids executing against eachother. If the item sells low it is probably, in my opinion, not an issue of the sniping but the fact that someone saw an opportunity for something that wasn't attracting much attention and put in a bid at the end of the auction. One activity that might be often confused as sniping is the bottom fishing via "Ending Today" or "Going Going Gone". As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, I often don't have the time to read all the listings. Especially in chips where even "Ending Today" can have over a thousand listings most seeming to be home sets. So, I often browse through the 8 or 10 pages of "Going Going Gone" and might bid on some low priced opportunities.

As is the case with the Sony VO-5850 VTR, that is sort of what I did. I knew I needed a 3/4" machine to dub and preserve my collection of material I produced in college and when working in Cable. I have enough to warrant paying a couple hundred bucks for such a machine and saw a promising prospect in the "Ending Today" section under Consumer Electronics > Cameras & Photo > Professional Video Equipment. Knowing I wouldn't, likely, be home when the auction ended I placed a bid in the last hours of the auction just in case. Like I said, I placed an honest offer based on the description of the machine, "Pluged in and Lights up". With such equipment it is highly emphasized AS IS and often the sellers, as was this case, don't have the monitors or tapes to fully test a machine. Many sellers are salvagers. Anyways, I held back a little just in case I got home in time but, not so surprising really, got outbid at $70. When I placed my bid, believe it or not, this machine had been listed for about 5 days and had 0 bids and I had it at $25. That was till inside the last hour when 2 more bidders executed bids. My max was $52. Bidder 2 had a bid of $60 and had me with $53. The winner won with $70. The winner is a person who reconditions this equipment and relists it. He has the resources and experience to fix the machine if there was a defect. I didn't have that ability so I wasn't going to risk that much on an untested machine. The winner of the auction could have just put in the $70 bid, or he could have put in $175 for all I know. These machines usually sell, reconditioned, for "Buy It Now" Prices of $300 to $400. Therefore in un-reconditioned condition the $70 might have been fair for the seller. Even though all the bidding came in during the last hour or minutes of the auction.