Broken countdown clock: auction ended when clock was at 35 seconds

[intervalmagic]

Tonight I missed out on a unique yet super inexpensive item because eBay's countdown clock didn't work. When I went to the page, I saw there was already one bid on the item and around 40 seconds left on the clock. I entered my initial bid and was ready to commit to it. At about 35 seconds, the auction (and bidding) abruptly ended. I know there are bigger problems in life, but how incredibly frustrating.

[whattheactualfox]

Going to take a guess on this, and this is me being 100% Serious

Possible Lag?

It's possible, it happened to me when I was 10 seconds in bidding on a Roomba.

[anjofak]

Sure can't do a 45sec soft close, but let's try surprise early ends..they must have fixed it.

[mudshark61369]

@intervalmagic,

By chance did you have that auction open for a while watching the clock wind down?  If you did, its possible the clock information was well behind the actual time left.  There are lags between the time info is sent from ebay, and then displayed on your device. The longer you leave an auction open, the actual time left may be much less than is displayed, so you have to refresh the page every now and then. When I have an auction open for awhile, I definitely refresh it with in the last minute.

[woodland_gnome]

Your bid must be RECEIVED and timestamped at ebay's servers before the end of the last second. The countdown is NOT a real-time feed of bids coming in and eBay's clock counting down and is not an accurate measure of how much time you have left to submit the bid (click the confirm button) so it is received in time. It is rather a script that runs on your device periodically calling for updates on the status and time remaining, and uses your device's clock to count down from the time left display it last received from eBay (which took time to traverse the internet and get loaded into your device's RAM so your clock could start counting down). There is no adjustment for latency either way and so it is doubly slow compared to the time you would have to submit for it to get to eBay in time.  AND it has been especially glitchy for the past few weeks.

Back before the countdown was introduced, it is was relatively easy (and fun) to synch a local clock to the time remaining by clicking refresh on the Bid History Page at a particular noted time per the local clock (top of a minute was easiest) and then adding the returned time remaining to that time; this automatically adjusted for latency both ways and gave you the second before which you had to click the confirm button (best to do that a few times and pick the earliest result and add a solid buffer time since latency can change). But the countdown replaced the static display that enabled you to get a single unchanging time left display upon refreshing so it's not so easy anymore. I now use and recommend a "snipe service" to place your one true maximum bid about 6 seconds out; mine allows limited snipes for free (up to 4 wins per month) or several different pay plans if you are using it more frequently (or want a bit more reliability that comes with a "mirror server" in another location than the main server) and uses an eBay supplied API instead of the glitch user interface. It also captures any error message that eBay returns if the bid is unsuccessful, as opposed to you using the user interface where any such error message is overwritten when the countdown gets to 0 so you generally don't even see it much less be able to read it. There are other snipe services out there with their own plans, but we are not allowed to make unsolicited recommendations of particular ones.

[eburtonlab]

If the auction countdown does not seem to be synchronized with the actual end of the auction, check to make sure your computer's time and date settings are correct, that your time zone is set correctly, and that your computer's time is synchronized with an internet time server such as time.nist.gov or time.windows.com.

Differences between your computer's time and other computers' times can lead to all sorts of problems including the inability to get needed updates.