I just lost an item where I was the top bidder and the item sold for less than my bid

[kwmarriott]

I've just been bidding on a guitar on Ebay U.K. I have an email from Ebay that says I bid £112 for the item. I didn't get an outbid warning but then got an email saying the item was no longer available and it had sold for £109. How can that happen? I have asked the seller and they don't understand it either.

The only thing I can think of is; are Ebay deducting the buyer protection fee from bids before the auction ends, so they would have been reducing my bid to below £109. That is a very poor way to do business if that is the case.

[woodland_gnome]

If you provide the item number we can check the bid history and listing to figure out what happened or There are several reasons why one might think this happened. Here are a few:

Your bid was rejected by eBay and so was not placed. There are many reasons why this happened, but you would need to have noticed and read (and understood) the error message eBay sent when it happened, and if you were bidding in the last seconds--in which case it was received after the end of the auction is the most likely reason--it might never have been displayed as when the Countdown gets to 0 it overwrites any display with the listing page.

You are mistaken about the amount of your bid.

You are mistaken about the final price.

You are mistaken that you did not win.

The seller cancelled your bid before the auction ended.

It was an auction with a Reserve Price and your bid though highest was less than the Reserve Price at the time you placed it, and it ended with you as highest losing bidder since nobody won OR you lost to a bid that was lower than the amount you bid because the seller lowered the Reserve Price after you bid to an amount less than your hidden maximum bid so eBay lowered your hidden maximum to $1 less than the new Reserve Price so you wouldn't win unless you rebid and you didn't rebid but someone else bid an amount that did meet the new Reserve Price and of course outbid your lowered maximum bid.

You bid more than the Buy It Now Price in a "Sticky BIN" category but the resulting "current bid" was less than 50% of the BIN price and someone used the BIN to buy it at less than your hidden maximum.