How eBay can save itself in 1 day

How about you bid your "reservation price" and have no regrets? Simply bid the most you are willing to pay and then last minute bidders won't matter. That is the beauty of a second price auction.

I seem to remember that they used to have that feature (or was it some other auction site)?<p>While I hate the issue, too, there might be disadvantages for the buyer, too. For example if the auction gets extended for 3 hours with each bid, it might mean that you have to sit around forever monitoring the auction if you really want the item.<p>A better fix might be to allow sniping (automatic bidding in the last second).<p>The reason for last second bidding is to avoid the pitfalls of human psychology, I think. If you start earlier and outbid other people, they might get into a bidding frenzy and prices will be driven higher than what makes sense.<p>I suppose ebay outlaws sniping because they actually want that effect: the higher the bid, the more money ebay gets. Personally I would prefer to decide on one price and stick to it, so sniping would be perfect for me.<p>All in all I suspect that ebay tested the "prolong the auction" feature and found that not prolonging it somehow works better - or at least it used to work better.

There are serious economists who look at these issues. The book Snipers, Shills, and Sharks, <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8435.html" rel="nofollow">http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8435.html</a> is a great summary of the research that includes this approach among a hundred others.

eBay has heard this proposal at least a bajillion times before, including at least 3 for me. I don't know what their reason is for not doing it that way but it's been heavily considered and rejected.

This would make eBay more complicated. I suspect that eBay will be slowly overtaken by <i>less</i> complicated rivals.<p>And dude, just bid your max price and then calmly await the verdict. I sure as hell don't want to have to watch nervously over a continuously extending date of purchase.

Ebay still has auctions? I thought it all went Buy It Now years ago.

New Zealand's eBay clone - trademe.co.nz - has auto-extend for auctions where a bid was just received.. The auto-extend is only 5 minutes though.<p>This doesn't eliminate last minute bidders though - rather it just extends the period of the 'last minute bidding war' till someone gives up.<p>So. Its good idea, but you don't want a 3 hour auto-extend - 3 minutes would be better. 3 hours, as suggested, would probably mean many auctions would not end for weeks and weeks and would likely frustrate the heck out of bidders and sellers alike.

Another fix would be if the exact ending time would not be published. Just something like "This auctions ends in the next 20 minutes".

eBay just holds it's "ending time" as some sort of holy grail. I really have no idea why.<p>Even if this was just a feature that sellers could opt for (for five bucks more or so), I think it would make a world of difference.