been beaten now 3 times on ebay-any tips?

mm --well Im now fully "read up" and keen to jump in and have a bash but despite putting quite high "maximum bids" of up to $600 on ebay on 3 RCI Points ones (all from 55,000 to 80,000 points with bonus points still to use) that started at 0.01 with low closing costs, Ive been outbid every time within last couple of hours. Quite frustrating as many of these finish when Im in bed in the uk.

Ive got current bids on 2 and if I dont win these will give up on ebay and onto the TUG market place which seems a lot more straight forward (but not too many points only offers--which to me seem less fiddly than depositing weeks and trading power etc). My only comment is I wish a few people would give a bit more info on the "weeks based deals" on roughly what points level it would equate to trading wise as definitely wouldnt use the vast majority of these actual weeks as UK based. However European based timeshares are harder to get for low costs. It may be some of these have already been paid and converted to "points" but people are missing out the detail.

If I dont win these and anyone has RCI Points based timeshare (already converted) that they need to get rid of between 60,000 and 110,000 , annual and M/fs of under $1000 all paid up to date and seller will pay majority of closing costs then im looking! (dont mind up to $350 closing costs/transfer costs myself) Bonus points not used are a bonus!

Im not keen on other points systems other than RCI as these are used more widely in Europe-meaning more choice

I have great luck on ebay, here is what I do. I don't bid on an auction until within the last few minutes, like 1-2 minutes range at the earliest. I then put the maximum amount I am willing to bid and let auto bid take care of the rest.

I do this for a couple reasons, most importantly early bidding will just raise the price of the item in the end as someone will most likely counter, and it will notify newbies who might not necessarily know which of the 10 deals they are looking at they should go for (or in the instance of sneakers/jewelry brings attention to it) , but when they see action on one of them they figure if someone else wants it thats the one. Also, they say when you bid on something you develop a sort of attachment to it with a desire to win it. Better to wait until the last few minutes, if its under your maximum bid go for it, if its already over your budget, you can just move on.

Some people also use tools like ebay sniper and whatnot, this is a program that will attempt to bid at the final seconds of an auction and "snipe" the item. I just do it manually at the 10 second countdown sometimes for fun., but if the time difference is the issue the program will definitely be of benefit.

I love to snipe an eBay auction. It limits my bidding to WHAT I WANT TO PAY, not what my fingers do in the last minute or two of the auction. Before I did sniping, I lost 2 or 3 auctions as my internet WIFI went down or computer locked up. I bid way more than I should have several other times.

Now, I figure out hours or days before an auction if I really need or want a TS; figure out the best bid for it I want to pay; set up the sniping program; wait to check til after the auction before checking the item on eBay again. A couple of times, I have cancelled the esnipe program and just let it go ... I didn't really need that TS. If I lose, there will be another tomorrow or next week or next month.

And the way it has been going for the past 2 years, it will be cheaper with less closing costs.

I use esnipe also - I still have bid credits there. And it works just fine for me.

My main issue on these is that on th US ebay (and thats where the good deals mainly are) they usually close at around 9.00PM US time which is anything between 2.00am and 5.00 am here and so I end up putting my maximum bid quite a few hours before this so I can actually go to bed! Definitely at a disadvantage in the UK on US sales unfortunately

Sniping is an independant service which uses your eBay account to bid automatically on an eBay auction at the last few seconds before the auction closes. There are several sniping services; fees are very low and the service I uses only charges a fee if I win (less than a $1 or 2 on most TSs) based on the closing price.

esnipe requires that you buy a block of bid credits in order to set up an action to snipe an auction. I think I invested $20 in bid credits - and still have many more credits to burn through.

The seller never deals or cares that you used a sniping service. Most of us here on TUG use sniping to bid on eBay. It you look at closed auctions and if the last bids come in 4-8 seconds before the close of bidding, those are bids placed by a snipe program.

will maybe look into this if I dont get the others--never needed to use it before

I really want points for the simplicity and only a couple of deals like this on the marketplace here , one of whom hasnt got back and one who tried to sell me something else entirely !

My favorite (comes with free trial and it's cheap!)...


www.ezsniper.com

Hasn't failed me yet.

I'm a huge fan of sniping, too. I know it has saved me a lot of money by not "showing my hand" until it's too late for the other bidders to do anything about it.

I usually manually snipe, but if it's an inconvenient time or if the Internet connection is flaky, it's very worthwhile to use a sniping service.

We won our Harbour Lake week via an E-bay snipe. Set the snipe up many days ahead of time. The auction was set to close while we were at work. In the final seconds the snipe service placed our bid for us and it won as no one really had the chance to manually counter our bid.

We use esnipe. One advantage is that you can cancel bids 5 minutes or more before auction ends.

I also sent you a email in regards to 3 RCI Points ownerships with extra points attached to them that might be of interest to you.

Bruce

I've had success sniping as well. I find the most satisfaction sniping live rather than having a program.

Just a suggestion: pull an all-nighter movie and ebay sniping night!

Careful though, it can get addicting and you'll then need to find the ever elusive TimeShareBuying support group for those of us afflicted with the addiction. So far no such group has surfaced.:rofl:

Anyway, have fun sniping!

Marty

I never put a bid in before 5 seconds left in the auction and do what others have described, bid the maximum that I'm willing to pay. Most of the bidding for most auctions happens within 30 seconds of the auction end and really no point in bidding earlier than 6-7 seconds before the auction ends. Early bids are just stalking horses. I've used auctionsniper.com when I can't bid manually and they're ok but have noticed that even though I tell the system to bid with 3 seconds left, they usually bid earlier than that (like 15 seconds) which defeats the point of sniping since other bidders have time to react to your bid.

How about buying a "buy it now" instead of doing the auction route.

The prices are still good and you don't have to compete with anyone.

Here is one for 53,000 points for $297. MF $773. Seller paying closing costs.

http://cgi.ebay.com/RCI-POINTS-Palm...md=ViewItem&pt=Timeshares&hash=item19be090319

There aren't alot there this week but the inventory is new everyday so keep checking if you don't like this one. I recently bought a Wyndham with Buy it now because it was at the resort that I wanted and it was a very reasonable price and I didn't want to deal with losing it so that's my suggestion.

Good luck to you. I love my RCI points account. Such great deals to be had.

I am based in Europe, too, and own a couple of summer UK weeks in addition to US and SA. There are some bargains to be had in some good UK weeks if you just check around.

I am personally allergic to points, but if I was inclined that way, I would definitely look at Hapimag, the world's oldest timeshare developer, which has a great network of European resorts, and it has always been a point system. They are based in Switzerland.

Esnipe user here too. I set it and forget it - that way I'm not swept up in the thrill of the chase and end up paying more than I really wanted.

I never bid directly, only with esnipe. It stops me from overbidding and doesn't cause a run up in price from early activity. Frankly, I think anyone who bids before the last minute is crazy. They are effectively bidding against themselves, and they also ruin things for other bargain hunters.

Of course, as a seller, I would say bid early and often.

Sniping is definitely the way to go. I use www.bidnip.com

Is you lose out, hang in there, another one will come around. In the end, with patience and sniping, you will get what you want...

If you are consistently being "beat" , by a significant amount,then your maximum is not the market price,if just by a few cents then it's just a matter of patience.

Snipping Programs have features called a group Bid

You could set up a bid group for Pacoima Paradise Time Share, each time you see an Auction for the desired property you enter it in the bid group.

You can even set a different price for each Auction, based on closing costs, unit size, week number.

The sniping program will continue to bid your maximum bid at whatever time frame prior to the end if the auction (usually five seconds or less),

The eBay proxy biding then takes over using the bid increments, so you might win at a number less than your maximum snipe bid.

If you win the sniping program cancels all the other possible bids on similar properties, if you lose, it just moves on to the next one when it s scheduled to close

With eBay you can only look at closed sales for 30 days, if there is a lot of similar activity you can get a fairly good idea of what the average market price is and factor from there

Often, you can win an auction in the final seconds with a bid that wouldn't have won if you did it several hours earlier. When you bid earlier, that gives other bidders a chance to become emotionally involved in the process and raise their bid. Most people will not initially bid the full amount they might be willing to pay, hoping to get a good deal and reasoning that they'll always have an opportunity to raise their bid. Then when they get outbid, they raise their bid (often even beyond what they were originally willing to pay). When you snipe, you don't give the other bidders a chance to do that.

I also use www.esnipe.com and have been quite happy with it.

vickyp said:

mm --well Im now fully "read up" and keen to jump in and have a bash but despite putting quite high "maximum bids" of up to $600 on ebay on 3 RCI Points ones (all from 55,000 to 80,000 points with bonus points still to use) that started at 0.01 with low closing costs, Ive been outbid every time within last couple of hours. Quite frustrating as many of these finish when Im in bed in the uk...

Click to expand...

What's the going price for points these days? 1 cent per point is a good deal for the annual MFs, but I'm not sure there are many with the purchase price as low as 1 cent per point, at least not if they have reasonable MFs.

Also, how much did the auctions you bid on end up going for? That would help tell you whether it was a sniping problem, or if your bids are just too low.

Have now one one of them, just waiting to see if I get the other one in the night.

At moment now have 54,000 points due to be allocated in January 2011 plus 54,000 2010 points still available. Dont have to refund 2010 M/Fs . M/Fs are around $780 and closing is around $500 (I can live with this ) This one cost me $1.25.

Last-Second Bidding Is Mox Nix When Somebody Else Bids More.

vickyp said:

been beaten now 3 times on ebay-any tips?

Click to expand...

Bid higher.

-- Alan Cole, McLean (Fairfax County), Virginia, USA.​

well have now won both of them and actually bid lower, I think its that the other 3 were extremely good deals with over 85,000 free bonus points in all cases and very very low closing costs and no 2010 M/fs.

Second one was a similar deal to the one I won above except only $200 closing and cost me $304 including closing costs and M/Fs of $786 In both cases have the 2010 points to be allocated also and no M/Fs to refund.

Therefore will give me 108,000 points every year plus an extra 108,000 initially and I reckon if I balance these out carefully and keep carrying forward points should give me about 125,000 or so every year which Im happy with for around $1500 in M/Fs. To be honest thats around £1100 and I hope to get 3-4 weeks out of this and Ive yet to stay anywhere that was really decent quality that cost us less than £750 a week but obviously will see how it pans out

Main issue in UK is we dont have the "last minute 9,000 points" options just a percentage reductions on points so we cant get quite as much value as those in the USA.

A big thanks to this site too as Ive learnt a lot on what to look for and also how to mentally keep a balance between only thinking "negative" when hearing the word timeshare. Clearly it works very well for some who have flexibility and time and who dont need school holidays all the time and are open minded to going to wheres available!.

Ok, but how do you do a PHONE snipe?

Okay, TUG snipe experts I need to figure out something similar to snipe-ing to get my summer timeshare reservation.

The window for reservations opens exactly at 9:00am. I used my computer to look at timeandate.com for the time. Put my resort phone number in, so I can just hit redial. Call in exactly at 8:59 and 59 seconds. But, no luck -- I always get the busy signal. (Only the first 2 phone calls in will get a week.) There are **WAY** too many owners competing against each other for the summer weeks.

Any suggestions on a service that would allow me to autodial a pre-selected number like 50 times in 1 or 2 seconds. Like something people would use to win those radio call-in contests.

Savvy Tuggers seem to know so many useful tricks -- I am hoping someone has an idea that actually works!!

--- Rene McDaniel