Gixen

I work at a very flexible job where I have access to a PC, so I used to sometimes snipe eBay auctions manually. It was sort of thrilling, but I did get wrapped up in my work sometimes and forgot to snipe. Or at home my toddler sometimes pressed the off button on my PC 1 minute before an auction ended and it took 3 minutes to get it fired up again.

So eventually I thought there must be a service out there to do this automatically, and I found Gixen. I must have been using Gixen for about 4 or 5 years now. I use it through the company PC at my job, my desktop PC at home, and my Chromebook. It is just a website you access, not an app or installed software of any kind. I have never had any problem with it, I can't remember it ever failing to place my snipe, and it has saved me probably thousands of dollars while enabling me to get the stuff I want more reliably.

In fact I'd be reluctant to tell other people how great it works (and wise up my competition) except my eBay buying will probably be considerably reduced in the future anyway... partly because I already bought most everything I could ever want, and partly because of how we now have to pay sales tax on eBay, which is a bummer.

I've been using Gixen as a buyer for several years and it's great! You set up a snipe for an ebay auction listing and seconds before the auction closes it automatically submits it.

With the paid service it has multiple servers to make sure the bid goes through. I'd never had problems with the free tier but pay to support the developer, and it's only $6/yr and I am sure it's saved me a lot more than that over the years.

As to the one star review from almost 5 years ago, gixen is certainly not a spammer or malware site. Those have to run malicious software on your own computer or exploit vulnerabilities in browsers - gixen is a very simply site, and I doubt it even uses Javascript. It's totally safe.

Gixen doesn't even need your ebay credentials but rather requires authorization from ebay to submit bids on your behalf. That takes less than a minute to setup and you're good to go.

If you've been frustrated by escalating auctions on ebay that get out of hand and raise your price, this is the only service I know of that works. Try it!

Gixen has a very singular focus. It allows you to place a maximum bid on any item listed for auction on one website - eBay.

In my opinion, the best way to secure an auction is to bid at the very last moment - it gives your fellow bidders no opportunity to overbid you. It's also useful to help you avoid the temptation to exceed a bid ceiling you had previously decided upon. I find it essential for bidding upon auctions when you are either busy, asleep, or doing the adulting you should actually be focusing on, instead of buying more junk on eBay. It allows you to group a number of auctions together and have the first successful bid cancel the others in the group. You can get this and more for free. Okay, you can only use it four times per month, but that's plenty to get a taste, or to satisfy the occasional sniper.

For just six bucks a year though you get unlimited bids, server redundancy (that will bid in the event the main server goes down), you get responses to your emails, and I've personally seen suggestions taken on board and made into new features. The owner, Mario, is clearly committed to making the site better and more useful to its users. I'm just about to renew my annual subscription for a second time, and as someone who bids 10+ times per months, I've lost count of how much the service has saved me.

This is one of a very small handful of sites I recommend unreservedly to my friends, clients, and family. Thank you Mario for an awesome tool.