This is why I don't use E-bay

I do fairly well manually sniping.

That's really the only way to use ebay unless you BIN, best offer, or over pay.

If you click on the "x bids" where x is the number of bids, you can see how many bids were placed and when they were placed. This will tell you if someone placed a really high bid early, or if lots of bids were placed seconds apart.

I don't see any point to shill bidding unless someone lists and sells enough volume to justify the time and expense of shill bidding to get maximum price on the items they do sell.