New Feature?
According to eBay supervior Janice, eBay now allows third party platforms to "snipe" bids which allow bids to be placed after the auction has closed and a winner has been determined. I personally am not a fan of this having been on the recieving end of the "New Feature", but would love to know what application allows me to bid after the auction has closed. I do not know how to attach a screenshot of the bid sheet that shows the "New Feature" in use.
21 comments
mudshark61369
·10 months ago@basamer-0 ,
"I have no issues with last second bids as I have both used them and had them used against me. My issue is the you won please pay page to a you lose page along with a the false non-sense and bad customer service I recieved".
I agree the 'you have won..." is premature when last seconds bids are placed. Though I do not remember it also having a Pay Now button. I always thought the old "you are currently winning..." notice was better, because of sniping services or experienced snipers. Do keep in mind that in the last seconds, the program that sends the You are the winner note, will not have time to send an outbid or You lost with a second or less left. That's why they now have the "We are determining the winner" message.
I'm used to the You're the winner, because my bids are usually registered with 2-0 seconds left.
basamer-0
OP10 months agoTo clarify, the issue I have is that I placed my bid, watched the countdown go to 0, then recieved a you won page with a winning bid of $600ish with the pay now button, and then the page changed to a you lose page with the bid beating my bid by one incriment. I have no issues with last second bids as I have both used them and had them used against me. My issue is the you won please pay page to a you lose page along with a the false non-sense and bad customer service I recieved. I have had neither happen to me in all my time with eBay as if it is a down to the wire bid then I recieve the loading page saying eBay is determining the winner.
eburtonlab
·10 months agothe issue I have is that I placed my bid, watched the countdown go to 0
If your clock is wrong, your countdown is wrong. Synchronize your clock to an online time server.
kathiec
·10 months agoWhat you experienced isn't a bid coming in after the close of bidding, it's eBay's servers catching up to a 0-second bid. You may never have seen it before, but it's actually not that uncommon.
eburtonlab
·10 months agoDid the message actually say you had won -- with a link to pay? Or did the message say you were the high bidder? There is a very big difference between the two.
Bidding ends a set number of days after the auction started down to the exact second. Bids are accepted so long as a bid for a valid amount is received by eBay's server before the auction ends, even if those bids are not displayed on individual bidders' pages around the world until a few seconds later.
eBay does not extend bidding, except for some extremely limited categories as an experiment. Once you have bid your maximum, bid extensions can not help you, only hurt you.
For some unknown reason eBay no longer displays the ending time to the second at the top of the bid history page, but if there are any bids you should be able to calculate the actual ending time by examining the starting time of the auction at the bottom of the page. Auctions always begin and end at the same time down to the exact second, unless the auction is ended early by the seller. All bidders have the same time to place valid bids, and no one gets any extra time. eBay time stamps every bid as it is received by eBay, and the times are displayed to the second in the bid history if you use a desktop browser.
If you think you have encountered an auction where a bid was accepted after the end of the auction, examine the starting time closely and compare it to the time the bid was received and you should find that the bid was received before the auction actually ended. If not, please post an item number so that others can see it.
If you bid the maximum amount you are willing to pay (taking into account any shipping or taxes) then the only way you can lose is if someone is willing to bid more than you were and actually does so, or if someone bid the same exact amount, earlier.
No one can count on having the last bid, and bidders should assume that other bids will be placed at the end of the auction too late to be reacted to, and set their bids accordingly. Note that the countdown displayed on your device and the bids you see are not updated in real time, and just because you did not see any other bids when your clock reaches zero does not mean that eBay did not receive other bids at the last moment.
You have not won until the page refreshes and you see a note indicating that you have been declared the winner and you see a link to pay or your payment is take automatically. A note indicating you are the high bidder issued while the auction is still ongoing is not the same as being declared the winner by eBay after the auction has 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.
glorybells
·10 months agoI have successfully manually sniped an auction with 2 seconds remaining. I’ve never used a sniping service. The things @eburtonlab mentioned above are key factors in making it work.
house*of*paws
·10 months agoI’ve had 1- and even a 0-second bid manually … but I didn’t intend to cut things that close. [A 6-second snipe will do the job. An 8-second snipe once allowed a rebid from the other bidder.]
Hi @basamer-0
Whatever a snipe service can do … bidders can do manually. The former is more convenient … but also riskier, since services can’t log out and log back in, which sometimes is necessary when eBay requires a new sign-in.
gosimus
·10 months ago@basamer-0
< "snipe" bids which allow bids to be placed after the auction has closed >
The auction had not in fact closed; see the excellent explanation that mudshark gave. One of the stupidest of all the stupid things that eBay has ever done was to truncate the seconds from the posted closing time. In my most creative moments, I can not think of a reason why eBay would have done that. It has lead to uncountable misunderstandings, like this one.
lacemaker3
·10 months agoDefinitely not a new feature. Sniping has been around as long as eBay has. Here it is in eBay policy:
https://www.ebay.com/help/buying/bidding/bid-sniping?id=4224
As others have explained, sniping does not allow bids to be accepted after the auction ends. Bids are accepted while the auction is active. In most categories, auctions end at the exact same time to the second as they were started. In some categories (trading cards) eBay is experimenting with a "soft close" where an auction is extended for 2 minutes if any bids are placed within the last 2 minutes. A lot of other auction sites use this feature, but I don't think it's going to prove very popular on eBay, or that it will revive the popularity of auctions here.
mudshark61369
·10 months agoHowever, if you scroll down the page to see when the first bid was placed you will see
ed8108
·10 months agoIncreased revenue for eBay & greater profit for the seller 😀
mudshark61369
·10 months ago@ed8108 ,
"Increased revenue for eBay & greater profit for the seller".
I disagree with the greater profit for seller statement. Extended time auctions do not encourage people to place their Max Bid. It is also a deterrence when a seller has many auctions ending within minutes of each other as many card sellers do.
Waiting two more minutes may cause bidders not to be able to bid on the other auctions they are watching, if they have a budget. I've run into that on a few other auction sites, where a large number of similar items are ending within a few minutes of each other and one is stuck waiting to see how much they have left to spend. Not to mention that on those sites one's max bid is shown.
basamer-0
OP10 months agoI know it is not an actual feature, but that is exactly what the customer support supervisor told me as a way of explaining how I was deemed the winner and then after the auction closed they allowed another bidder to place a bid that beat my bid. The bid sheet shows their bid being placed after the auction ended and according to the representatives even eBay's clock says the bid was placed after the auction ended.
glorybells
·10 months agoThis sounds like what is being referenced is the experiment being done testing “soft closures†on items in certain categories, where a bid coming in within a certain time frame will extend the auction time. It’s not what’s happening across all auctions, and it doesn’t allow for more bids after the auction has actually closed. It’s been rather confusing to a lot of people, and I suspect that a misunderstanding of that is what is actually prompting this discussion.
basamer-0
OP10 months agoWell if that is the case, it blocked me from being able to bid during the extended time window because it was showing me the "congratulations you won" page before swapping to the "you lost" page. And for clarity it was not the "you are winning" page but the "you won" page that I was shown.
dryophelia
·10 months ago@basamer-0
Was it one of the Live auctions eBay is using for a couple categories.
Would you care to share the item number?
basamer-0
OP10 months agohttps://www.ebay.com/itm/306507253344
306507253344 is the item number
lisa5768
·10 months ago@basamer-0
The winning bid did not come in after the auction ended, it came in the same second it ended. From the bid history page:
Auction started: 20 Sep 2025 at 10:15:01am PDT
Winning bid and Auction end: 27 Sep 2025 at 10:15:01am PDT
It can take the system a few seconds to display all the bids when they come in the final seconds. The winning bidder could have used a bidding service or been very lucky with their timing.
basamer-0
OP10 months agoIt still displayed that I won. I know something shady happened because each representative I spoke to gave me different times of when the bid was placed.
lesegouts
·10 months agoIf so that's just **bleep**.
stainlessenginecovers
·10 months agoNot true. If you talked on the phone, you talked to Alice in Wonderland by Disney- just a wonderful imagination with no facts.
Yes, there are 'sniping programs' and that is nothing new- but when an auction is over, it's over. Most don't operate on the EXACT same clock that you have; so best to just 'bid your highest' and if you win, you win, and if you don't, no big deal because I was only willing to go as high as $X.