Hey, maybe I am missing something obvious, but how come, when you look at ebay bidding history for a certain item, you sometimes see smaller bids appearing later than larger bids?

For example, item 859086731 was a very active bidding contest (it was not sniped, though). moonflowerkeep was actively bidding, with his/her latest bid of $160.00 occurring Apr-18-02 07:17:18. However, ey2ly1@msn.com bid $155.00 at Apr-18-02 16:16:41, that is, $5.00 less 11 hours later. There is an even more extreme disparity just below that pair of bids between mjkundaitis and moonflowerkeep where the difference in time between the earlier larger bid and the later smaller bid was three days!

Please help me understand what's going on here. Thanks.

Doesn't eBay's bid history feature list the bids in order, from largest down to smallest, regardless of when the bid was received?

What you're seeing in the bid history is the actual bid (rather than the current high bid) in order of magnitude.

When ey2ly1@msn.com bid USD155, s/he could see that moonflowerkeep was the high bidder, but the then current high bid appeared only as USD150. One s/he'd made his/her bid, s/he'd have got an immediate "you have been outbid" message and the high bid went up to USD156, with moonflowerkeep still the high bidder.