With everyone tightening their belts in this economy, we need to make every dollar count, including our weight loss dollars. La Weight Loss bars on eBay are cheaper than paying retail, but you can get them even cheaper using an auction tactic called sniping. Basically it boils down to waiting until the last few seconds of an auction and placing a bid.

There are a few rules I have found to being more effective in winning La Weight Loss bars on eBay.

Rule #1 - Be sure you a logged in before you place your bid. Nothing sucks more than to sit there watching an auction tick down to the last second, place your bid and then realize you are not logged in! You are going to lose precious seconds or miss the chance to bid if you have to log in at the last second.

1. Be prepared to lose the auction. Don’t Chase An Auction! Don’t let the need to win undermine your efforts. Determine how much you are willing to spend and stick with it, there will always be another auction. I always check to see if there are multiple auctions of the same flavor bars or at least another flavor that I would be happy with. That way, if I lose the auction, I have backup auctions I can snipe.

2. Know how much you are willing to pay. Normally I try to get my bars for less than $1 each/including shipping. So I divide the shipping cost by the bars to determine how much each bar costs to ship and then subtract that from $1 to determine how much I will bid per bar. If I can find a “buy it now” auction that is within a few cents of what I want to pay, I go ahead and buy that instead, it’s not worth my time to watch an auction if the savings isn’t significant.

If shipping is $10 for 100 bars, each bars costs .10 to ship, subtract .10 from $1, that leaves .90 cents per bar to bid or .90 X 100 bars = $90 as my top bid.

If I can’t find any backup auctions for flavors I like, I may decide to increase my top bid. But, I decide ahead of time.

3. Know how fast your browser refreshes the auction. I normally check my refresh speed as the auction time begins to wind down. Hitting F5 will refresh the browser window and if you are watching the auction time on the page, you can determine how many seconds it takes to refresh the page. From that, you can figure out how much real time there is left in the auction.

4. I try to hold off my sniping bid until the last 20 to 30 seconds. That has several benefits. First it limits the time anyone else has to place a higher bid. Second, it lets me have time to rebid if someone else has already set a higher maximum bid. Third, it gives me time to bid again if there is a problem with the transmission of my bid.

5. Try to locate auctions that are ending around 5 to 7 pm on Weekdays or the middle of the day on weekends. The reasoning is that people are busy at these times or are out of the house, so there is less competition. I don’t really worry about the ending time too much for items that I know are going to have plenty of backup auctions, but this is one more trick to add to your auction sniping arsenal.

That’s it for auction sniping La Weight Loss bars on eBay. Be logged in, know how much you are willing to pay ahead of time, know how fast your browser refreshes so you can accurately tell how fast the auction is winding down, wait until the last 30 seconds to place your bid, look for auctions ending at times when people will find it difficult to be there at the auction close, and the final rule, don’t chase an auction or get into a bidding war. Your goal should be to get your La Weight Loss bars on sale, not to get an ego boost from winning the auction.