Bid Not Placed, No Response FRom Support

Support is not as fast as the forum for getting a reply, and may take a day or two. Since I can't see your snipe, (Sara may pop in and help) I can't be of much more help than that.

Sundays evenings are notoriously slow, and would guess your bid was 'Not In Time'.

In light of my negative experience and the lack of a timely explanation, I increased the lead time on my next snipe to 25 seconds. This afforded an opponent time to make THREE responsive bids. Only the third of these bids succeeded. Therefore, if I had not been forced to increase the lead time due to my lack of faith in the current reliability of this system, I would have gotten the item. I am furious. I could do better manually.

Heya Tim,
Would you mind sharing the auction number on the second auction?

I can certainly understand you being furious.

Lexie

Wow, three? Those are some fast fingers!! As Lexie said, let us take a look at the auction for you.

And,
our forum!

The number of the auction where I was outbid on the third bid was 3801262455. The winning bid was posted three seconds before the auction ended. As I stated previously, if I had not increased my lead time due to the absence of a timely explanation for the failure of my previous 15 second snipe, I would have gotten the second item.

Hiya again Tim,
I kinda think that rev shabbazz may have won, regardless of when your snipe hit, it looks like he was sniping as well as proxy bidding. I would also say he had alot deeper pockets that you on this item.

I dont know about your other items, Sara from AS support should pop in and have a look at those ones.

Puppy might pop in and give that Auction a run through his data table.

Sorry about your loss, I have been using AS for a fair while now and it is a really great service that will save you lots of money in the long run, but I can understand how you dont have alot of faith in it - at the moment. If you stick around and give it another go, I am sure you will love it.

Lexie

The following table has been reorganized and sorted into date order.  First
bid placed is line #1.  That should make it easier to follow the auction.
Two additional columns have been calculated and added.  They are the current 
bid and high bidder, as displayed on eBay after each bid is placed.        v2.1.08
* = Winning bid. (may be less than actual maximum entered.)
 
                     Max                        Current Winning
 #    BIDDER         Bid      Day & Time         Bid  &  Bidder
                    (US $)
  1   tda44           4.99   01-Mar  14:19:54     1.99   tda44        
  2   justgogogo     11.99   01-Mar  21:24:43     5.24   justgogogo   
  3   geoffreywhit   11.00   05-Mar  13:29:06    11.50   justgogogo   
  4   terrapin710    12.01   06-Mar  12:35:59    12.01   terrapin710  
  5   justgogogo     13.01   06-Mar  14:38:12    12.51   justgogogo   
  6   yrunvsgsr_19   15.50   06-Mar  22:44:19    13.51   yrunvsgsr_19 
  7   greenwoodsma   14.01   07-Mar  20:57:49    14.51   yrunvsgsr_19 
  8   skioa          32.00   07-Mar  22:23:26    16.00   skioa        
  9   oldndef        17.90   07-Mar  22:41:36    18.40   skioa        
 10   oldndef        21.75   07-Mar  22:42:03    22.25   skioa        
 11   franklinstow   30.01   08-Mar  10:27:32    31.01   skioa        
 12   axamaxa        55.40   08-Mar  10:53:51    33.00   axamaxa      
 13   skioa          45.00   08-Mar  11:02:35    46.00   axamaxa      
 14   skioa          50.00   08-Mar  11:02:53    51.00   axamaxa      
 15   bbigtim       102.78   08-Mar  11:11:29    56.40   bbigtim      
 16   rev_shabbazz   93.00   08-Mar  11:11:36    94.00   bbigtim      
 17   rev_shabbazz  100.00   08-Mar  11:11:46   102.50   bbigtim      
 18   rev_shabbazz *105.28   08-Mar  11:11:53   105.28   rev_shabbazz 
        End                  08-Mar  11:11:56              

I don't know either way. I believe rev would have bid the 93.00 in line 16 reguardless, and maybe one more after seeing tims snipe if placed at 15 seconds. Rev probably would not have bid again if sniped at 5 seconds.

This is one of those 'Maybe, maybe not's'.

Bartelby,

I don't agree with your conclusion about Rev. Shabazz. He is a dealer who was buying the item for resale and he paid top dollar on a wholesale basis. I do not believe he would have succeeded anyway unless he was stacking bids, and intended to submit multiplre bids sequentially no matter what. This is tricky to do, but you can pull it off if you open multiple windows in advance.

I am not a novice here. I have been with AuctionSniper for a year and have won dozens of items using AS in that time. It is an invaluable resource for those of us who don't want to be tethered to our computers.

I am just irritated because I could not assess the reason for the prior failed bid. The status of "did not win" is not among the standard messages, the confirmation button provided no information, and support was (and remains) missing in action. So I had to assume that the system was broken and increase my standard 15 second lead time at the most inopportune moment.

By the way, I use 15 seconds because it leaves little time to respond but also creates a minimum bid increment issue for subsequent snipers.

Tim

The snipe missed was at 7pm Sunday.

Sorry, we placed eBay however munched it.

We're modifying our confirmation page to show when we sent the snipe to eBay and when we received their reply, if any.

In this case their system just ate the bid and never replied. They just get too much traffic to handle. We aren't processing 1/10th of what we could handle, even at our peak, so I know it's not us. Plus we snipe 4 times. Nearly impossible that al 4 of our computers screwed up in different parts of california.

Sunday 7pm is probably the single busiest ending of auctions on eBay all week.

And I'm sure we even sent this snipe at least with a 30 second lead time, overriding your 15 seconds, and it still wasnt early enough.

[This message was edited by Sniper Sara B. on March 08, 2004 at 11:17 PM.]

Hi Tim!

I understand your angst. You're probably right about you most likely winning the item had you set your snipe to your usual 15 seconds lead for the auction ending Monday night. For sure, the rev would have placed AT LEAST one bid which would have boosted your bid to $90+, but had his bidding been similar to what he did in this auction, he probably would have not had the time for 3 reactionary bids to yours.

A lead time of 15 seconds is a good all purpose lead time. The only time 15 MIGHT not be enough is on a busy Saturday or Sunday night PST. For instance, March 1 there was a severe ebay slowdown that resulted in 30 second lead times NOT BEING ENOUGH!?! While slowdowns THIS severe are more of the exception than the rule, there are several snipers here that set their leads on weekend nights to something in the 20-25 sec range.

If I'm not mistaken, Monday is a notoriously SLOW ebay night, so your customary 15 second lead most likely would have been fine.

Jabbergah                                                  

Sorry my analysis wasnt right Tim

Lexie

Bartelby,

No problem. I am present on this forum only because a problem occurred. I sense that some of you are here because it functions as a virtuaL community.

I based my strategy on a good understanding of the eBay bidding system and of bidder psychology. I really didn't understand until this happened that the technical limitations of the eBay servers during peak periods are also an important variable. Is there any time other than Sunday night when one should make allowances for this?

Tim

I'll give you my personal 2 cents worth...I normally snipe at 8 seconds. On Sunday between 5 and 8:30 PST, PM I add 15 seconds. On the half, quarter and hour I add 10 seconds. The reason being is that when Ebay sets up automatic starts for auction sellers, these are the times available, sooo, it makes a backup.

Jabbergah,

I appreciate your feedback. You indicate that Saturday night is also a time when eBay may be overburdened. Should I infer from what has been said here that Sunday night is the most congested but that Saturday can also be a problem?

Tim

Mrs. M,

Thats helpful. Thank you.

Tim

If eBay were to give us direct access to their systems such as they do with seller tools this problem would be eliminated. So if you ever have chance to get a word in with eBay let them know you'd like your "buying tool" company to have access to the eBay API the same as seller tools. They dont even currently have a way to bid in their API. While they dont have rules against sniping they are sorta letting us know what they think because of the above. It's ok to snipe, but they dont want to make anything to help. Even though I bet snipers are their best customers out there!

...recommendations for SELLERS that the best times to end auctions are on Sat or Sun nights(PST or ebay time) because there are the most bidders on ebay these nights. Because of the higher traffic on the site, that is why there are slow downs on ebay, which can affect how ebay intereacts with AS when it is trying to sign on ebay & bid in behalf of snipe clients. With that in mind, that is why several snipers increase lead times on auctions ending on Sat & Sun to decrease the chance of missed bids. As Mrs.M decribed, auctions ending exactly on the quarter hour on weekends are notorious for suffering slowdowns in ebay response.

I re-read my last post and it was ambiguous when I said Monday was a SLOW day. What I meant, Monday is a LOW TRAFFIC day and therefore your 15 second lead on that day SHOULD have no problem with ebay slowdowns.

Hope that helps.

Jabbergah                                                  

Thank you to all for your feedback. Based on what Mrs. M and others say, the odds were relatively high that my original bid would go astray, since the auction was scheduled to end at EXACTLY 7 pm on a Sunday. It is unfortunate that I did not have this insight in time to prevent me from increasing the lead time on my subsequent snipe.