The aim in any auction is to secure the item for the lowest price, with online auctions you have a distinct disadvantage you never know who is bidding against you.
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Final Bid from VCOM can do something to help, it will bid on your behalf, as little as possible, and perhaps most importantly as late as possible. It is designed to work with the various Ebay sites but should you know of others then providing you enter the correct URL it should work fine.
Installation is just a matter of a couple of minutes and you will be around 12MB of hard disc down. Next you enter the site you want to bid upon and a few housekeeping details such as your Ebay user name and password.
If you are new to online auctions at this point you can go through a tutorial to show you whats what.
Most online auction lots run for a set period of time and this will rarely end at a convenient time for you, either work or sleep seem to often interfere. With Final Bid this need not matter. Providing you leave the PC and Internet connection connected Final Bid will do its stuff.
Lets assume you are interested in one of the new Photo iPods and the auction closes at 4AM tomorrow morning, you could stay up and monitor progress, you could set the alarm for 3.45AM or perhaps easiest leave Final Bid running and wake up to find out if you have been successful. You feed the information into Final Bid with the maximum amount you are prepared to pay and thats it.
Shortly before the auction is due to close Final Bid starts sniffing, if the price has already passed your figure it does nothing, if it is still below your figure it gets ready to place a bid in the final minute and if outbid then it bids again etc.
I am unsure what happens if the other person (or persons) is using the same or similar software as someone has to lose. One thing I am certain of being a piece of software it sticks to the limit you imposed and will not bid any more.
Final Bid works out what is the minimum rise above the current price and that is what it bids. Another point where Final Bid can help is with what it calls Group Bids lets say in different sites there are several Photo iPods and these all close at times fairly close to each other, assuming you only want one then as soon as you have been successful the whole Group Bid is closed even though there could be several Photo iPods still to close.
I would advise caution as everything to do with auctions is volatile, especially as far as Group Bids are concerned, double and even triple check what you are asking it to do, remember it is software working on a machine and it carries out your wishes, so do make sure they are your exact wishes.
Final Bid is sold in the UK by www.guildsoft.co.uk (and their dealers) for £34.95.
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