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Additional bids
eBay added 4 bids 5 minutes after the end of the auction.
I have fast internet and no problems. Why do I have to pay an additional $25?
1 comment
woodland_gnome
·2 years agoNo. It did not. You have to pay the full price based on the highest bid of the second highest bidder that was received before the end of the auction because that bid was timely and valid. Check the timestamps on the bids on the Bid History Page on the full website and you will see they were all received before the end of the last second of the auction (add the "Duration" to the starting time displayed on the Starting Price line).
eBay keeps very accurate and precise track of the time that the auction begins and when it ends (x days to the second or fraction of a second--I'm not sure whether that is at the end of the clock second or the anniversary of the fractional second it started since there are no displays of the fractional seconds) and the time that the bids are received.
HOWEVER the DISPLAYS of when the auction ends are terrible. eBay truncates (rounds down to the minute--even if it is 12:34:59.999 it displays as 12:34--or even hour on some displays) all time displays regarding the end of the auction on all pages (except on the main listing page for the auction only after it has ended). And the Countdown is not what it appears to be (more detail than you probably want to know below). I suspect you watched the Countdown, and then the static page at the end said you won at $x AND THEN after "5 minutes" you did something that caused the screen to display a refreshed status on the auction with the updated (accurate) price.
The countdown you see is not a real-time feed of bids coming into eBay's servers and the eBay clock counting down. Rather, it is a script that runs on your computer and calls for updates on the auction status about every 3 seconds. It uses the time remaining from those updates to start your own computer's clock counting down from the time the page loads or the last successful update, and displays the "current price" and your status as of the last successful update.
Meanwhile, on eBay's end, a bid coming in is timestamped before eBay does anything else with it. If it gets the timestamp before the end of the last second of the auction, it is a timely bid. Then the bid must be processed to see that it is a valid bid for that item (meets the currently calculated minimum bid amount, not subject to a seller block or over the Buyer Activity Limit or from an account with a bidding suspension, timestamped before the end of the auction) before it is handed over to the server that is calculating the status of the auction. This is usually all done in a fraction of a second, but sometimes can take a couple of seconds. Only after the status server calculates the new "current bid" and leader is that information available to be sent in response to an update request from your computer (and it takes some fraction of a second for your request to get to eBay's servers and another for it to get back, get loaded into RAM, and get displayed on your screen, and the script runs the clock down from when the new "time remaining" loads in RAM, which usually results in your countdown being slow because of the time lag).
So, between the 3 second (at best, not all updates are succesful) gaps and the time to process a new bid, there is always at least a 1-4 second window at the end where the results of a new bid will NOT display on your countdown screen before YOUR clock reaches 0 and the script calls for a full refresh of the Item Page. At that time the results of the late bid usually come up (you are not seeing the actual bid, you are seeing the calculated "winning price" or "current bid"), but I always (and everyone should) give it a few seconds and then manually refresh just to be sure before relying on the result as final (again, on a busy night it might take a few seconds to finish processing a bid).
Congratulations on your win at at most 1 bid increment more than the next highest bidder was willing to pay.