Product Reviews

Regular users of online auction site eBay will know only too well the disappointment of losing out to a last-minute bidder. It may not be in the spirit of things, but sniping - to give it its proper name - is on the increase. In fact, a number of web-based sniping services have appeared recently and, for a percentage fee, will place bids for you automatically in the final moments of an auction.

FinalBid is different as it runs on your own PC rather than a web server and uses its own browser interface to log you into eBay, from

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which you can set up and store bids. As the auction nears its end, FinalBid comes to life and waits until the last minute before placing the next highest bid. If outbid, it will keep upping the bid until it reaches your maximum or the auction ends, which it can do many times in those last important few seconds. You can also group similar items together so that as soon as FinalBid wins one it deletes all the others and refrains from placing the bids.

FinalBid uses Internet Explorer (IE) as the basis of its browser, but it lacks much of IE's functionality and seasoned users will find it rather irritating. We found it preferable to browse eBay using Internet Explorer or another browser and copy and paste the item numbers into FinalBid. This is hardly ideal though, particularly for power users.

As a way of winning auctions while you're away from your PC and, hopefully, saving you money, FinalBid works well. To be effective, though, it needs run on a PC that is switched on and connected to the internet 24 hours a day. Considering this and the initial outlay, a sniping website could well work out cheaper.