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Here's something I would really make use of. Apologies if it's been suggested before (or in fact AuctionSniper already does it but I've not realised!)

Quite often I might find something I really want and set up the snipe or bid accordingly. Often I will look through the seller's other items to see if they have anything else I want (and maybe I can combine postage and so save money).

Now that second item might well be something I'd not go for on it's own, but is only of interest because I'm already dealing with the seller for Item 1, and I'm saving postage/paperwork.

SO in essence I am saying that I only want item 2 IF I won item 1. Examples where I find this happening to me are DVDs and lego. Often the sellers of such items list whole rafts of them all finishing in the same hour so I'm not generally around to monitor how Item 1 went before deciding whether to place a snipe/bid on Item 2.

SO I would like to be able to set up a bidgroup with the two or more items, but instead of AuctionSniper stopping bidding when "X" items in the group have been won, I would like AuctionSniper to stop bidding on any more items in the group as soon as one fails.

Hope that makes sense!
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This was left by "Sniper Sara B." (AS support) on September 18, 2002 11:59 AM

"This is something we call contigency bidding and we dont have such a feature yet.

"It basically allows you to set a condition whereby a snipe is only placed if you won an item of your choosing before that snipe.

"I think it would be a cool feature but I've only heard it asked for once before. It would probably be something hard to program and most people wouldn't use or know how to use so it's not something likely to be added, but you never know."
I have to voice my opinion, I feel feature would be a valuable one for your company. I too have such a need where collectors sell mutiple items; where if one the first bid one fails, I would like to be able to automatically fail the rest.

I understand the programming model would be hard to implement on a system where each snipe currently has no relation to other snipes, you would have to change that!

One problem would be user interaction. If I was the designer I would simply link the snipes in a chain. By having a checkbox saying "Link to other snipes outcome" would all that is needed (with an already existing snipe id required of course.)

Simply implement this rule to the user:

Once one item in the link fails regardless of position, all other bids are canceled from that point on. So if the first bid fails, then the rest. If the third bid fails, all bids subsequent then fail.

Just my thoughts.
I too would find this feature very helpful. I buy a lot of low priced items from sellers with multiple auctions. I don't want to buy just one and have to pay $3 postage on an item costing $3 so I will buy several items from the same buyer to cut the per item cost.
I would love to see AS offer this feature.
I don't do this kind of bidding, but it occurs to me that if we can have bid group folders, why not have contingency bid folders which alone are subject to the if-yes/if not-no test? That would keep them all together in some coherent form so far as AS is concerned. If they aren't in a contingency bid folder, they don't get that treatment. Bids would be made by AS so long as all the preceding items in the contingency bid folder (sequenced by closing time) had been won. Any loss would automatically close the folder like a bidgroup folder, so that no further bids would be made on the remaining contents of the folder no matter how long that folder was around. Would that simplify the programming somewhat?

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