Gixen

Been a user for many years. Gixen has never let me down. If bidding on eBay is part of your life, don't waste another minute bidding directly on the eBay website. Let Gixen do the heavy lifting for you. No more waiting for that last second to try to get an item you've under-bid. Gixen will do it for you, reliably, conveniently and inexpensively. For a few bucks a year, I credit Gixen for my 90% auction win rate... while saving me the cost of Gixen many times over. Gixen is simply indispensable.

Many years ago, more than ten, I have been utilizing Gixen as my exclusive auction sniper product. The only auctions I have ever lost while using Gixen were those that I under bid.
I have used Gixen at least 100 times. I have never lost any ebay auction as long as pricing didn't go beyond my specified price limit.
The short of it? You can trust Gixen to get it done! You can also trust their administration to notify you for any changes in the site. I recommend Gixen Sniper to anyone who wants to consistently win their auctions. Set it and even if your offline Gixen will still win your auction. Good service.

I started using desktop-based sniping tools several years ago, in order to place the maximum bid I wanted without having time for afterthoughts and going above self-imposed limits. The issue I encountered is that my machine had to be on, not asleep, and connected to Internet.
The major concern I had with on-line sniping tools is that I would give my eBay password to someone else and I had to blindly trust them and trust that they would be well protected against hacking.
With Gixen I have a threefold piece of mind: 1) it does no longer handle my eBay password, 2) it provides me redundancy in placing my bid, by using also the backup server at a different location (so far, in several years, it hasn't missed any of my bids), and 3) I can set up a snipe from everywhere and I don't need to be sitting at my computer that runs the sniping program.
I never had the need to deal with the customer service, since Gixen has been rather reliable for me. Looking at the bulletin board I see that they are very proactive in dealing with all issues and glitches.
The service, on my opinion, is fairly cheap and well worth.

While the basic Gixen is free, I use the "mirror" service which offers the second server and multiple ways to customize the timing and combinations of bids and without any limitation to the number of bids. I have been a customer for about seven years with close to ******* bids on eBay during that time. You do need to understand eBay's biding rules to avoid missing out on an opportunity. While I did not win every time, I did not bid more than I wanted and often won for less than my maximum bid.