JBidwatcher

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Greetings,
I mostly agree with the previous commenter; the best way to bid is to fix
an amount you're willing to pay for an item, and bid it once and late (i.e.
snipe). That's what JBidwatcher aids in doing.

The 'overage percentage' is tricking yourself by saying, 'I'm only bidding
$500', when you could actually be bidding as much as $600 (with a 20%
overage). And what happens that time when you forget the overage
percentage is there, and actually bust your budget?

But the real reason I'm not comfortable implementing it, is that
JBidwatcher does not do a final 'how much is the item' check before placing
the bid at the end of the auction. If it did, that would be an additional
network round-trip, and that would interfere with the accuracy of the snipe
timing, and opens up 'race conditions'.

The simplicity of placing the final bid is the key, in fact, to getting
relatively accurate snipe timings. Older versions of JBidwatcher did a
great many things during the snipe time, which tended to make it less
accurate. Now it's very limited in its behavior, doing most of the work 2
minutes in advance, and just a single-page submission at the end.

Since in most auctions the majority of the activity happens at the end,
anything more complex (like the feature suggestion) might just fail as
often as it succeeds. Mainly when a bid comes in *after* the 'amount
check', but *before* the 'snipe submission' phase, so the program thinks,
'It's okay to submit the base bid', but in fact that amount will lose, but
the program didn't know that because it hadn't seen the bid that came in
right after the amount check. Then you'd get mad at me, because
JBidwatcher didn't bid the overage (which would have won the item), and it
ended up going to someone else...

Just bidding the extra amount that you're comfortable bidding should
usually behave better, and is less potentially error-prone.

-- Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!

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This doesn't seem to make any sense to me. Why don't you simply start with
the higher snipe-amount from the beginning? Or should that be a
psychological trick to make you give away more money than you could
afford?