biddER. jumping in near end of bidding with time stamp of 8 to 12 hours before with HIGHER BID .

Question

what kind of secret unaccounted to public bidding allows a secret bidder to jump in only at the last few minutes with a higher bid but with an 8-12 hours earlier time stamp (should have shown at proper time in bidding list) and the auction ends suddenly 10 seconds before schedule. What's going on?? When auction is "over', the bid list no longer shows the "Private, identity hidden" bidders.

woodland_gnome · Answer

The bid and bidder were there all along (but the bid amount showed a lower amount because eBay hides the full amount of the leading bidder's bid that exceed the calculated price of the item and substitutes that calculated amount (generally 1 bid increment above the 2nd highest bidder's highest bid) for the actual amount/

And the countdown you see is not an accurate measure to judge "10 seconds before schedule", and the displays of ending times tend to be truncated to the lower minute or hour.

A lot of people make incorrect assumptions about the bid history display. A few things to know in order to read a Bid History:

Never go by a bid history on a mobile app or the mobile web. They are deliberately incomplete and worse than useless.

Any bid of the high bidder that is higher than the "current bid" (what the price would be if there is no further activity before the auction ends, calculated primarily by the "underbid"--the highest bid of the 2nd highest bidder--generally the underbid plus 1 bid increment) is displayed with the current bid amount instead of the actual bid amount. All other bids show at the actual amount of that bid. Thus there can be multiple bids of the highest bidder at the top showing the same amount.

Bids are sorted by AMOUNT of the bid (the hidden maximum for each bid of the highest bidder showing at the "current bid" amount at the top), not by time received. For some reason people tend to expect them to be from latest to earliest bids, and if they notice the timestamps some take that to mean something is wrong rather than adjusting their expectations of how it works.

If there have been any cancellations or retractions those are shown in their own section below the main bid history table. Be aware that when a bid is retracted prior to the last 12 hours or cancelled at any time ALL prior bids by that bidder are removed from the main history but information on only the last (which will be the highest) will be given in that section.

The "Show automatic bids" function is a tool that attempts to recreate the "current bid" that may have shown at various times during the auction but it is only that: a tool to recreate (it is not a record of what actually showed at various times); a tool that attempts (it is often wrong, displaying "automatic bids" that never were the displayed "current bid" and not showing what actually showed as the "current bid" at various times such as what showed before a cancellation or retraction--a good thing as showing that could reveal more of the leader's bid than should be shown--or when a Reserve Price is first met--showing what that reserve was, not so good an omission); the timestamp on the "automatic bid" is not the time that that "current bid" was started to be displayed but rather is the time of a bid by the bidder it is attributed to; in any event the notion of "automatic bids" is misleading as it is based on an imperfect analogy used to oversimplify the eBay bidding process (in reality, eBay doesn't "bid on your behalf" but rather calculates what the price would be if there is no further activity before the auction ends, displays that as the "current bid" and hides the full amount of any bid by the highest bidder that exceeds that calculated price by substituting that "current bid" for the full amount of that bid).