Bid not taken.

[jilltill69]

I bid on an item for $350.20 and the screen and on the screen it showed my highest bid was $350.20. The auction closed and the item went for $307.00 to another bidder. Do I have any redress?

[lyndal1838]

How close to the end of the auction did you place the bid?

Sometimes your Internet connection can be just too slow for it to register in the last seconds.

[jilltill69]

It doesn't matter.I didn't win. I repeat I saw my confirmed bid  of $350  as the clock was counting down. Ebay accepted the bid and then lost it.  I just thought someone may know what happened. Thanks for your time anyway.

[bsal6160]

All comes down to a matter of timing. Look at it like this

You place maximum bid of 350 at any time.

1.0 second to go someone auto bids 310

0.5 seconds your auto bid goes to 306

0.1 theirs goes to 307

Auction end

[digital*ghost]

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@jilltill69 wrote:

It doesn't matter.I didn't win. I repeat I saw my confirmed bid  of $350  as the clock was counting down. Ebay accepted the bid and then lost it.  I just thought someone may know what happened. Thanks for your time anyway.

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When did you place the $350 bid - before or after you were outbid at $307? If eBay accepted that bid, and it was placed after your $302 was outbid, it should have not only shown you as the highest bidder, but shown the current price, which would have been at least $5 more than $307... (i.e. $312.20 or more). 

I've never had this happen personally (have had the misfortune of confirming a bid a second or two too late, but in that case ebay clearly told me time had run out and the auction was over), but there have been a couple of people say much the same thing (i.e. that they placed a bid, but someone else won the auction for a lower price), the only thing that seems to be in common is that these bids are placed in the final stages of said auction, so my best guess is that there is an issue with the countdown timer and auction  status updating. 

[lyndal1838]

Digi, I have noticed that the countdown timer has had a few hiccups lately.....it appears to stick for a few seconds and then jump up to 5 seconds at a time.

Luckily for me my years of training in manual sniping has not been forgotten......as soon as the 10 second mark is reached my instinct takes over and I mentally count down the next 5 seconds and hit the button.

[springyzone]

I have had the same thing happen in that I have bid for something in the last few seconds, had the bid accepted and then have been shocked to see someone else named as the winning bidder. In fact I once saw a message that mine was the leading bid, only to see another name come up as winner (on a lower bid). When that happened, I had bid in the last seconds and I was expecting it to come up with the next page where it says congratulations, you have won this auction. But it came up with nothing, not even a sorry, you were outbid, so I had to go back and click on the item to see what had happened. Like you, I was shocked.

I can only think that in those last few seconds, although ebay accepts the bid, the auction is actually finishing at that exact time so the system doesn't have time to take your bid on board.

As someone suggested, maybe there is a glitch in the timer.

But for sure, whatever ebay uses to register the end of the auction and to register a bid isn't one and the same thing.

[cq_tech]

There are going to be some extremely unhappy sellers out there if this proves to be a relatively common issue. 😞

[padi*0409]

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@cq_tech wrote:
There are going to be some extremely unhappy sellers out there if this proves to be a relatively common issue. 😞

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cq, I noticed a while ago that if you have the item page up for an auction, so long as you don't look at (for example No of bids) then the countdown goes ok.

If you do however check something on the item (eg bids) then the countdown timer stops at that point, and when you go to place a bid the timer shows the time when you exited the page, thus giving a false "time left".

Hope that makes sense......................... 

[jilltill69]

I can understand if I had bid at the last minute but I entered the higher bid hours before and watched the countdown. Anyway I have learnt a lesson of not to count your chickens. Thanks for everyones input.

[lyndal1838]

Are you sure we are talking about the same item?

The last bid you placed was just 7 minutes before the auction ended.   If you had placed a much higher bid hours before the end then you could not have entered the lower one at 7 minutes.

Were you perhaps bidding on more than one of the same item, because what you are saying here does not make sense.