OP, if you had set your maximum bid at, say, $100, you’d probably have won. When it comes to setting a maximum, you need to make it the very highest you are willing to pay, so that if you lose, you know you were not willing to bid even 1¢ more.

The problem with using eBay to bid automatically on your behalf is that your maximum is out there ready to be exposed. As other bidders bid, your bid will be automatically increased to beat them, and a bad-intentioned “bidder” can bid you up to the highest you have bid, then retract their bid with an excuse, having thus exposed for their knowledge what your maximum is.

It doesn’t even have to be a bad bidder; another bidder having placed their maximum (let’s say it’s just $5 lower than your max) will automatically drive your bid up to that level.

If you wait until the last few seconds and bid your absolute maximum then, you’d have a better chance of avoiding the process of nibble-bidding and could well win at a price considerably less than your max.

However, if someone else is also bidding in those last few seconds and their max is higher than yours, of course you will not be the winner.

Manual sniping runs the risk of a slow-running server, failure of communication (so bid never received), forgetting, your computer having a fit, etc.

Using an auction sniper is strategically more likely to succeed. There will be a mirror server in case of failure from the main server, no forgetting, bid placed in last 3 or d at o seconds and much faster than any human can bid, and once again you’ll only be increasing the highest bid by the required increment, up to your max but often well below it.

I won’t belabour the fact that 19:00:48 is contained within 19:00… it’s not yet 19:01. That appears to be how eBay have set up the end time but it may show time after final processing. At any rate, that’s the time displayed but I wouldn’t rely on that being time actually bid.