Final price.

Question

I won an auction and the final price was indicated as $16,500 which is what showed on the website when it said I won. I watched the final few minutes, my maximum bid was $17,000 and the high bid amount increased a couple times to final amount of $16,500.

When I went to pay the deposit as requested, the final price was then $16,900. I am completing the purchase at that price, but I would very much like to know how and/or why the price increased by $400. The higher amount is what eBay conveyed to the seller.

I have made several hundred purchases on eBay and have never seen this happen. Thanks,

disneyshopper · Answer

What is the item number? It would appear that another buyer placed a bid, causing your bid to be increased by $400 By looking at the bid history, we can confirm what happened.

woodland_gnome · Answer

Check the Bid History Page on the full website. You will likely find a bid in the last few seconds for $16,800.00 that was not reflected on the PREMATURE "final results" displayed at the end of the countdown. See below, especially the bolded section:

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).