Max bid not refreshing

[amirnatan47]

I had the max bid on an item and every time somebody outbid I received immediate notification from eBay. Up until the last one. One minute and 38 seconds before the end of the auction somebody offered more than me. However, the price didn’t refresh on the iPhone app although I refreshed again and again. The eBay clock showed as ticking down with my price as the max in the end. I received email 10 seconds later saying I was outbid.

1. How come the clock continued ticking down showing my bid as the max and not refreshing as it always does?

2. How come I received no notification that someone outbid me? 

I bought a different item and I didn’t have those issues. I called eBay but the answers I received were not satisfaying. I still think there is some problem with the system which misleads buyers. The notification eBay claims sent to me was never received and I received ALL other notifications. The bid didn’t refresh although it refreshed immediately before.

as I see it there are only 2 options:

1. System bugs eBay fails to admit. The notification never received on my side although all other received. This is not a problem on my phone or settings. This is a problem on eBay side that they need to be honest and admit. The refresh thing is strange as well that for the last 2 minutes it showed my bid while there was already higher bid in the system. Combination of those 2 issues show that the bid was inserted at the eBay system but their software fell to monitor it on time and refresh the max bid as well as send notification. That means the software didn’t react for almost 2 minutes for the last bid. This makes all the auction process useless and I doubt I will ever use it again unless eBay will be honest about the issue and not blame it on phone settings.

2. There are employees, hackers that might use the system to their advantage by putting bids after auction ended to look like the bid was inserted before the end.

Amir

[woodland_gnome · Accepted solution]

Never expect to be able to rebid if  you are outbid (or even to rebid at all:  there is a seller setting that many use that has the unintended consequence of not allowing the leading bidder to rebid to raise his/her maximum).  Also do not bid on an app, there are way to many issues with that (the following is how things are in a full browser, app or mobile browser would be even worse):

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 succesful 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).

If you bid your TRUE maximum, it doesn't make any difference whether you saw the bid before your countdown ran out--if you had been able to react to it before the auction ended you wouldn't have reacted anyway, since you would not let yourself bid more than the MOST you would be willing to pay. If you did not bid your TRUE maximum and were unable to react, now you know why it is important to bid your true maximum REGARDLESS of what anyone else appears or doesn't appear to be bidding. Highest bid received (but not cancelled/retracted) before the auction ends win, but the price is set by the high bid of the SECOND highest bidder (again, as of what is received but not cancelled/retracted before the end).