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Bidding at 5 seconds left
Ok I have a question. Yesterday I bid $50 on an item with 5 seconds left, it popped
uo I was the high bidder with 1 second left, yet when the auction ended, somebody else got a $51 bid in during that 1 second, and I lost the item. Today, I bid $17 on an item with 5 seconds left. The auction ended, and it never registered my bid. The item sold for $5. I’m trying to understand the algorithm and how, I can lose an item, bidding at 5 seconds AND seeing I was the high bidder-so there wasn’t an automatic bidder putting in someone else’s highest bid, they had to hit a number and hit enter in tht 1 second period, but today, when I bid $17 it never registered my bid. Does eBay cater to certain sellers and try to get them more $$? It doesn’t make sense to me. Someone had time to bid AFTER my bid yesterday, but today, my bid wasn’t registered in time. It’s not my connection, I’m at home just like I was yesterday. The seller today, was cheated out of $, while the seller yesterday was awarded more. Why? Or do they just not like me and don’t want me to win an auction by sharking at the end? 😂😂
woodland_gnome
·2 years agoYour 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, which is sometimes there and sometimes not, another problem with using the user interface) 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 (which can vary from day to day, minute to minute) and so it is doubly slow compared to the time you would have to submit for it to get to eBay in time.
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.