The current method of preventing bid sniping leads to bidder fatigue.
Last Friday GoDaddy sent out a somewhat confusing notice about a change to GoDaddy Auctions and auto extensions.
Previously, any bid placed within the last five minutes of an auction extended the clock by five minutes.
Now, a bid placed in the last four minutes of an auction will reset the clock to five minutes; a bid placed between the four and five minute marks will increase the clock by one minute.
Also, the clock will not be affected if the high bidder changes their proxy bid but doesn’t trigger a price change on the auction.
These are nice improvements, although they might not go far enough.
The point of adding time to the clock is to prevent bid sniping. That’s when people use software (or quick fingers) to place last second bids on an auction, thus preventing another bidder from having time to enter a new bid.
While a laudable goal, the current state of auction auto extension at many marketplaces leads to another problem: bidder fatigue.
Many of us have been in an auction in which a competing bidder waits until the last minute to place a bid and thus extend the auction another five minutes. They aren’t doing this because it took them until the last minute to bid. They’re doing it as a game of attrition to wait out the other bidder. If you extend an auction every five minutes for an hour, a competing bidder might just give up. Not because they don’t want to bid more, but because they don’t want to waste another hour of their time playing games.
Although it would require some programming, I’d prefer a system that does a five minute auto extension for the first late bid, but then shrinks the time after that. At that point all bidders will be logged in and playing close attention. They don’t need another five minute alert to respond.
Jacob Fedosky says
Andrew,
I completely agree. The current process makes it next to impossible for students / those with full time jobs to participate in some auctions.
Bret Fausett says
It strikes me that you only have bidder fatigue when you don’t completely trust the auction platform. If you had 100% trust in the security of the auction platform, with complete comfort that the size of your bid would not be used against you, you’d leave your top bid at the outset and walk away.
The ghost of “halvarez” continues to haunt all of the platforms…
Robbie says
Many times I am in $1000+ auctions, where the high bidder does not pay, what about all the times these deadbeat bidders are the second highest bidders. Deaf ears at godaddy in terms of this issue which has been going on for years, and their exec mgmt dept agrees with it, but I wonder why they don’t execute this issue, more money for the house.
Saheed says
@Jacob. They make impossible for everyone.
I quit using . Tired of bidding work. Then are the domain renewals after I won the auction and spend a long time finding the domain. They get renew and I get nothing for time on site.
Big waste of time on GoDaddy. I make money with same time contacting people that own domains and want to sell me. Much better money.
Jacob Fedosky says
I’ve had better luck reaching out directly to buyers as well.
It’s not just GoDaddy with the extension problem, though. I find it hard to participate in auctions at NameJet as well. Full time investors may not have a problem watching an auction “end” for hours, but I am not able to dedicate that kind of time to a single auction when I have to work / go to class / etc.
I certainly think there is an opportunity for one of the auction houses to rework their auction rules in a way that encourages more bidding. I actually misunderstood GoDaddy’s announcement last Friday and wrote an article about how I thought it was a great idea that they were getting rid of the indefinite extensions: http://jacobfedosky.com/2014/07/11/heres-godaddy-might-fetch-huge-sales-new-auction-rules/
Scott Neuman says
One minute extensions would be fine. I wish Ebay offered it.