There is NO such thing as a stupid question.
Honest!
When Sellathon refers to snipes it's a service such as "Auction Sniper" that swoops in with the bidders bid in the ending seconds. It's not a proxy bid that we place on eBay that does the last 20 seconds...but a service that you use to go in with the last few seconds.
Here's the link to Auction Sniper and the explanation below that from Wikipedia.
http://www.auctionsniper.com/
Auction sniping
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Sniper (auction bid))
Auction sniping is the process of watching a timed online auction (such as on eBay or Yahoo!), and placing a winning bid at the last possible moment (often literally seconds before the end of the auction), giving the other bidders no time to outbid the sniper. [1] Some bidders do this manually, and others use software designed for the purpose, such as Auction Sentry and Ebay Sniper. A bid sniper is a person or software agent who performs auction sniping.
There are also online sniping services, such as AuctionSniper.com and AuctionStealer.com, where the software agent is run from a website rather than the sniper's own computer. This decreases the failure rate of the snipe, because the website is expected to have more reliable servers that might be quicker to react.
Good Luck,
Donna
PS, beautiful art