Wikipedia
eSnipe is a website designed to allow eBay buyers to automatically bid at the very end of an auction. As of December 2010, eSnipe charges a fee if an eBay buyer makes a winning bid, and does not charge anything if the buyer does not make a winning bid.
This process of last minute bidding is known in the online auction community as sniping. This is defined as placing a bid on an auction item at the last possible moment. The benefit to a bidder is that it gives other bidders very little time to react and place a higher bid.
Prior to eSnipe, manual sniping had been widely practiced for years, often by auction enthusiasts who kept multiple browser windows running with one hand and stopwatch in the other. A class of utilities that ran on the users’ machines started the automated sniping trend, but they were not reliable because of inaccurate system clocks, unpredictable computer performance, and outright crashes at inopportune times. eSnipe pioneered the concept of a sniping service run on high-speed dedicated servers with 24-hour support. eSnipe is the clear market leader with 50,000 registered users, placing more than 10,000 bids a day that average about $16 million per month.
eSnipe's founder placed the site for sale on eBay in December 2000. The auction was won by an eSnipe user, using eSnipe to place the winning bid.