Won and then I didn't

Question

Bid on item 204376160359 at 8:59.59. Immediately showed I won. A few seconds later it indicated I did not win. I looked at the bids and the winning bid was placed at 9:00.01 which was 1 second after bidding had ended. It showed the late bid was the winner. How did that happen?

woodland_gnome · Answer

Do not assume a precision that isn't indicated. hh:mm is not the same thing as hh:mm:00.000. eBay truncates (rounds down) its time displays to the lower second, minute, or even hour depending on the page you are looking at and in some cases how much time remains. hh:mm could be anywhere from hh:mm:00.000 to hh:mm:59.999. That's OK on search results and the like, but they also truncate to the minute on the main Listing Page for the auction while it is still active (but see below), and a couple of years ago started doing it on the Bid History Page for the actual endtime (but the bids are still to the second, confusing things further).

In this particular case the auction started 25 Jun 2023 at 7:00:01pm PDT and ended exactly 7 days later Jul 02, 2023 19:00:01 PDT (they have restored the seconds display to the "Original listing" of completed listings and you can see this at https://www.ebay.com/itm/204376160359?_trksid=p2047675.l2557&nma=true&si=MSs%252FcC1aaWLa7ntUVYVJYBC3i6s%253D&orig_cvip=true&nordt=true&rt=nc) The winning bid was received and timestamped before the end of the last second and was timely.

Any indication that you had won the auction was premature. It takes a little time for all accepted bids to be findable by the servers calculating the winner and price. ALWAYS wait a few seconds and refresh the page before you rely on the apparent results. A few months ago eBay tried out putting a delay on displaying the final results to account for this but it was unpopular and didn't last long.

For an active auction with a bid you can calculate the endtime to the second from the starting time and duration displayed on the Bid History Page IF there has been a bid (there is no direct display of the endtime of an active auction on that page, only for completed auctions).

quiltgeek · Answer

Check the starting and ending times for the auction. They are identical and I'll bet they are 9:00:01 or a few seconds later.

Furthermore, both the other bidder and you bid very, very late to have a good chance of being the highest bid amount. They just bid a little more than you did.