I've noticed that the post that has received the most reads/comments is the one I wrote around 3 years ago, titled eBay addict. In it, I lamented how addicting eBay is (particularly to a cheap frugal person like me), and how I need to start an "Ebay Addicts Anonymous" group.
I never realized that people can actually have an addiction to eBay. I wrote the post partly in jest, because anyone who knows me knows that I'm a bargain hunter. However, when the shopping/spending habit truly becomes an addiction, then it's no longer a joke.
That being said, I've found myself buying less things on eBay nowadays and have actually SOLD quite a few items. I have a few groundrules that I've set to prevent myself from getting sucked in to an auction.
- Establish your spending limit. Obviously this is a catch-22, as it can backfire. If you enter in your max bid 3 days before the auction ends, someone could swoop in and bid $0.50 over that bid with 30 seconds to go and win the item. On the other hand, if you wait until the last minute and get in a bidding war, you find yourself saying, "Hey, it's only $2 more to win… $5 more…" etc etc etc, until you find you've won the item and spent $40 more than what you wanted to. So, that being said, I usually do a combination of the both. If it's an item I REALLY want, I tend to snipe but make myself do only ONE bid in the last 30 seconds, walk away, and if I've won, great. If not, there's always another time. The getting up and walking away is the hardest, because you know there's always someone else who may have the same plan as you.
- Use the "save search" function. I'm always looking for one item that I need buy don't necessarily need to buy this second. Instead of searching every day, I do one search, save it, and eBay will e-mail me a list every day of the search results. You can even set the min/max cost so you won't get a message full of 200+ results in each e-mail.
- Watch out for excessive shipping charges. I absolutely refuse to purchase from a seller who advertises an item for say, $1 (that normally costs $35) and then charges $25 for shipping. It's illegal by eBay standards to do this, as it circumvents paying a higher commission to eBay. (e.g., if you sell an item for $1, you pay a lower percentage of the original listing and selling
price to eBay than if you sell an item for $20. eBay doesn't take a cut of shipping fees.) Even if it's still a better deal to purchase the $1 item and pay $25 shipping, I'd rather go buy it for $20 and pay $7 or $8 shipping since THAT seller is playing by the rules. - Never buy anything directly from Asia, especially electronics. It's just sketchy.
This last tip may or may not work against you. If you use Firefox, there's a great extension called myTimeZone for eBay. If you're like me and hate that the ending times are in Pacific Time Zone, this add-on will change the time to your local time. In addition, you can see bid updates in real time (rather than having to refresh), and the page displays a countdown timer with an audible alarm. Also, it allows you to sort listings by total price plus shipping, remove the "featured items" and "additional matching results" section at the top of search results.
myTimeZone MAY (kinda sorta) work to your addiction advantage, as I've found it's not synced to the eBay official time and can be 30+ seconds off. 
So, if it IS off, you can choose not to re-sync it when the dialog box pops up and thus make it seem like the auction has ended when there are really 25 seconds to go… and thus prevent you from doing any more auction snipping.
And that's all I have for today. 