Cost of 7" Victor, Improved Berliner, Etc. Records

[gramophone-georg]

Well put, gramophone-georg. The main reason for me to start using sniping software is that I'm based in the Netherlands, and that most records I'm interested in are sold by Americans. So there's an 8 hour time difference, and all these auctions end in the middle of the night. For years I've set my alarm clock, sometimes 3 or more times, during one night, so I could make sure I wasn't outbid in the end. And those were the days of dial-up connections, so there was always the option of losing an auction because sometimes my connection would crap out. Until one day a fellow collector told me about the existence of sniping software.

In my experience it's usually those auctions where people are bidding up against each other like crazy, days before the auction ends, that end up with the highest selling prices. Actually, it's those people that annoy me the most. Why start a bidding war when you know the auction isn't going to end for another 3 days? It seems to me that a 3 day bidding war could drive up the price much more than a 3 second war, even if the bidding is done manually.

Bingo. See what I said above in my "discipline" rap. I think that placing a bid early on affects us like a pup marking his territory. Like I said- with a snipe, I set it and forget it. If i lose, I'm still PO'd about it but at least I've deprived myself of participating in a silly bidding war where my opponent could very well be one of the seller's buddies.