Hi All

I have been using auctionsniper for a couple of months now with great success, but the other day I had the first anomaly with this item :

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=4017697026

My bid (riffraff1210) was £13.75 with a 1 sec lead time (yes I know not recommended but I've had no problems so far). The first indication that something had gone wrong was when I received an email from Ebay saying that I had been outbid by another bidder ! I was puzzled by this because I had placed no manual bids - only a snipe at 1 second, which was highly unlikely to be outbid. When I logged onto AuctionSniper I saw the message 'Bid Placed Successfully', and further examination revealed that AS had placed the bid at 08:59:34BST, around 1.75 hours before the auction closed ! Luckily I happened to be around my PC at the time and was able to bag the item with a manual bid, but I would have lost it for sure otherwise.
So I was wondering what happened, and if I would be entitled to some free snipes ?

Every week from 1-3 AM Friday, (eBay/AS time) AS goes down for maintenance. Snipes for auctions ending in these times are sent in just before system goes down. Your auction ended at 2:43 AM     Check the time >Here<

and WELCOME to the forum.

Makes sense, thank you for your answer.

Yep, they do maintenance during that time. Sometimes they are up, sometimes down, sometimes a little of both. Since we cant tell which or when it's best that we just place them all a few seconds before 1am.

They used to do maintenance every week and always be down, thus there were always 0 items ending then because sellers couldnt list any items then. Now though they are up one week then down the next so it's quite possible items will be ending when eBay is down and bids wont be able to be placed. If it's know they'll be down it's actually decent time to get a good deal because other snipers are going to be locked out of bidding while yours will have went off before eBay goes offline. They usually announce on Wednesday afternoon if that we'll they're planning on being up down, or a little of both.