Locked
Discussions in this board are limited to the original poster and Community Mentors
eBay's new horrible policy: "extended bidding"
Summary: working_stiff expressed frustration with eBay, believing they experienced "extended bidding," which they felt was deceitful as it seemed to extend the auction time, leading to a higher bid. mudshark61369 explained that eBay only applies extended bidding for trading cards and automobiles, suggesting a possible glitch on the user's device caused the time discrepancy. Similarly, eburtonlab stated that extended bidding hasn't expanded to other categories and advised checking the computer's time settings to ensure proper synchronization with internet time servers.
I've been an eBay user for decades, and just today I bid on an auction for a laptop, I hedged my final bid amount right before the auction ended, made the amount generous so I would eclipse any bidders in the final seconds, and I won! ...and then the freakin' auction counter reset and added what looked like another minute and a half! In that time, others were able to run up the amount another $50 to my maximum (yet I still won). I would have been much more conservative on my final bid if I knew there with this trick of extended bidding to keep things rolling (since there are many auctions for this kind of laptop). Why in the world have an auction end time if it just flips and keeps going?!?!? That's a grift and a joke! It's to milk the bidders, that's why. Disgusting! I'm so pissed at eBay for quietly rolling out this 'feature'. eBay, you're screwing up! No one has timed auctions just to say "surprise", we're going to keep it going a little longer... ha ha ha! No. This is deceptive eBay. You guys know you're starting to have sneaky policies, which is why it's really difficult to find a path to complain about them, isn't it? I'm so disgusted and disappointed in eBay. You guys know better... you never had this policy before FOR A REASON! It's because it is unacceptable!
eburtonlab
Mentor3 weeks ago@working_stiff
Although eBay experimented with extended bidding for trading cards, as far as I know that has not been expanded to cover other categories.
What is the item number? A review of the bid history using a desktop browser should indicate when the bidding started and ended.
If your auction countdown is not behaving correctly, check to make sure your computer's time and time zone are set correctly, and the date and time are synchronized with an internet time server such as time.windows.com or time.gov.
Check your computer's time here:
https://time.is/
If your computer's time is too fast or too slow, that can prevent you from bidding at the end of an auction. Either your computer will think the auction is over when it is not, preventing you from bidding, or else you will think you have more time left when the auction is about to end. Neither situation helps you. Set your computer's time to automatically synchronize to prevent this from happening.
mudshark61369
Mentor3 weeks ago@working_stiff ,
eBay only extends an auction time in two categories of items, Trading cards, and Automobiles. If the auction was an eBay live auction and your bid was entered in the last 5 seconds the clock ads another 5 seconds to the auction and any bids received in that time frame ads another extension.
If the auction was a standard one and the time clock reset, it could be a Glitch The countdown timer runs locally on your device's browser or app cache. If your connection drops or lags for a split second, the clock can desynchronize, causing it to "rubber-band" or visually jump backward by a few seconds or longer when it refreshes data from eBay's servers. Maybe you need to check your device's time synchronization.