A seller has 2 auctions for 2 identical items, and the second auction ends only 3 secondsafter the first one. Ideally, I would like to put them in a Bid Group, and win only one of them. But, given the situation, I have to wonder what will happen.

Would a bid group function correctly in this situation? In other words, if I would win the first, would AS have time to 'see' that and cancel the second? Or, if I lost the first, ... you get the picture.

Meanwhile, rather than take the chance of winning both (or neither), I'm sniping only the second one, normally.

I'm going to guess here but I doubt there's a way for AS to deal with this even if you put your first bid lead time longer than normal. The report back to AS from Ebay just won't happen soon enough to affect the second auction in the bid group. Choices here would be snipe on one only or bid manually.

Well, thanks for your input but, that much I had guessed on my own.

Still hoping for an official response,
Rich

Apparently one of the benefits of the new overhaul is that the required gap between bid group bids has been cut from two minutes to as little as five seconds.

From Sara B., AS support posted on 6/7/02:

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I wish I could offer personal verification on this, but I haven't tested it out yet.

In answer to your question, I guess hree seconds would be cutting it a little TOO close!

For the original post, see the topic on this board :

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You can see Sara B.'s original post and the questions which led up to it.

Just in case you don't get an "official" response.

I talked to the programmer and you should be able to do snipes for bidgroups at: lead time + 1 second. So with only 3 seconds between snipes you can do a 2 or 1 second lead time on the second auction to end.

So as long as you have a very short lead time on the auctions it will work. I guess in this case 1-2 seconds would work.

Really though there isn't a great solution for auctions ending this closely together. The best solution would be for any seller not to list their auctions so closely together. Most dont though.

If you want to try it and see what happens I'll give you a couple free snipes for reporting back with the results...