Bid retracted 3 days later

Question

How can ebay allow someone to retract a bid 3 full days later? This is absolute **bleep**. Bid: 14 Jul 2023 at 11:41:36pm PDTRetracted: 17 Jul 2023 at 2:27:55am PDTExplanation: Entered wrong amount

woodland_gnome · Answer

The cutoff is 12 hours before the scheduled end of the auction. Only after that does the deadline become 1 hour after the bid is placed (but not after the auction actually ends).

There are two valid reasons to retract under eBay rules: The seller added language to the listing that significantly changes the description of the item being sold, or to correct a typo in entering the bid amount. If a bidder makes a typo resulting in a higher bid than s/he intended to make s/he might not notice it until other bids have pushed the "current bid" up over the amount s/he thought s/he had bid (and at that point the required rebid of the correct amount would likely be impossible as the new minimum bid after the retraction lowers the price might still be more than the bidder intended to bid). And the seller can add language to the bottom of the description up until the 12th hour. So a valid retraction may well occur days after the bid.

On the other hand, eBay has done little to nothing to enforce the rule against lying on the bid retraction form by choosing from the short menu of reasons ("picking a lie") for almost a decade (and I'm being generous to eBay with the "little to").