Disparity between the listing count down clock and the one on the Bid History page.

[mudshark61369]

Before anyone decides to reply saying the countdown clock can have delays between the time info is transmitted and it is received and displayed on a device, I know all about it!!!  I posted this issue a couple of months ago with hopes this would be looked into, but crickets to that post.

Last night I was going to snipe an auction and had it open for 15 minutes prior to it ending. I also had the bid history page open at the same time.  The clock on the listing was showing 15:00 left, but on the bid history page it was showing 16:17 left.  I refreshed both within seconds of one another and the bid history was within a couple of seconds of the Listing clock, but it steadily lost time until it was about 30 seconds behind the listing clock.

Because of the disparity, I decided to place my bid much earlier than I normally would within the last 10 seconds.  I had the bid set and ready to click on the enter bid button  with 30 seconds left and clicked on it with 20 seconds left, only to receive a message saying the auction had ended.  I switched to the BH page and it showed there were 15 seconds left and counting down. 

Before setting up my bid I had closed and reopened the auction with 3 minutes left so the info would be fresh. There was no other devices connected to my internet at the time, and my computer had been cleared of cookies and files a few hours earlier. 

It is well past the time ebay started actually fixing ongoing issues, instead of "Improving" the site.

[4pawsup*]

I have had this happen when bidding on auctions. I do not know why it happens unless ebay is trying to discourage sniping. That is just a hunch though as i have no idea if that is the reason. It is frustrating though when you track an auction for a few days and right when your ready to bid it ends. Good luck in the future. I just move on and keep trying. 

[eburtonlab]

I refreshed both within seconds of one another and the bid history was within a couple of seconds of the Listing clock, but it steadily lost time until it was about 30 seconds behind the listing clock.

Is your computer having problems keeping the correct time?

Check your computer's time here:

https://time.is/

You should see a display of the difference between your computer's time and internet time at the top, like this:

Your clock is 0.7 seconds ahead.

Accuracy of synchronization was ±0.011 seconds.

Check again in an hour and see if the time difference has changed appreciably. If it has, you may have a problem.

If your computer's resources are stretched very thin -- by performing lots of resource-heavy tasks like a deep scan or a big update -- that can sometimes cause other low-priority things (like keeping the time synchronized) to slip. It might be worth a reboot to see if that makes any difference.

And check to see if your computer is set to keep the time synchronized automatically.

[flutterbubble]

I hear you and I have tested this too to confirm it occurs in many timezones and on different devices & pages (can confirm the discrepancy exists on desktop and mobile).

Sadly Ebay still preferences sniping which means bidding users are exposed to issues like this more often. With the way the auction closing is designed any physical human bidding is at a huge disadvantage and humans are kind of forced to accept that & losses due to the timer services. Any server bots bidding can still fail but the failure rate for server bot bid sniping is much smaller. The way the auction is designed it is designed so humans will lose to bots that can read multiple forms of data and respond near instantaneously. Loss due to the timers being out in the last minute of an auction is pretty common when sniping is preferenced.  Its the game, auctions that preference sniping, that is wrong in this case while the services and hardware often have unavoidable discrepancies that cannot be fully removed, (much like how human reaction times and information input times can differ slightly on any day/time/person/lack of coffee or more adrenaline etc but they cannot be improved much more than is physically possible with organic systems).  

If instead when a new bid is placed with less than 2min remaining an auction end clock gets reset back up to 2min of bid time the frailties of servers, services being out of wack, systems and code actually get fixed. As it allows users enough time to update bids, the demands & need for sniping drops dramatically and it is better for both sellers & buyers, humans & bots, to compete on a fair computing ground, (where seconds of information difference and different service update methods matter less).  If you knew that if there was a last minute change you could counter it in 2min (which would not be exactly 2min for everyone but it would at least be enough time to counter most IT issues while still being short for wait times) then you would have been able to at least enter your bids with the knowledge you could still counter anything bid afterwards.

Sadly the services for different views do differ significantly so the timers can be out of wack (not by much but still significant if a human is sniping), sniping in auctions is preferenced by Ebay business design (prob for cheaper sales with an IT advantage), and the system is exposed even more with sniping preference so that users are more exposed to IT, browser, server reaction times & code issues. Hence why some sniping bot services are set up in specific time zones, added server load capacity and even physical locations to data centers. Even then they still suffer faults due to delays and difficulties with final/closing times.

It is highly unlikely Ebay techs will able to remove all discrepancies of auction closing times for everyone, even in one country. The best they can do is to either update functionality or hardware to shield against most issues. As for users many have resorted to bots for the better reported closing times compared to humans using vision to read data from a browser page view and better response times than a human clicking a button to submit on a browser page view.  

I still prefer the human touch but then I have to take the losses (lost chance to bid in seconds before closing) as they come. Most bots have will have faults too when they miss out on accurate information.