Bid placed 40 seconds EARLY

If anyone cares, the ending bid history:

gfb................ $177.55 Oct-12-03 16:59:55 PDT
blades2000 .... $175.99 Oct-12-03 16:59:49 PDT
french.one...... $171.00 Oct-12-03 16:59:46 PDT
crawfishcharlie. $169.99 Oct-12-03 16:59:15 PDT <<<<
french.one...... $161.00 Oct-12-03 16:59:33 PDT
french.one...... $152.00 Oct-12-03 16:58:59 PDT
mr.rich1.......... $150.00 Oct-12-03 16:57:10 PDT
french.one...... $137.00 Oct-12-03 16:58:46 PDT
french.one...... $110.00 Oct-12-03 13:10:53 PDT

I am so mad, because of you I lost this item. I could have put a bid in myself but because I trusted auction sniper, I lost. You can see from the bidding history that the high bidder entered a bid in the last 30 seconds and won the auction.

The auction ended at 20:00, you can see angel8arts put in another bid in response to being outbid by me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

angel8arts( 61) $168.39 Oct-12-03 19:59:48 PDT
lifeofryley( 42) $165.89 Oct-12-03 19:58:59 PDT
angel8arts( 61) $151.00 Oct-12-03 19:59:31 PDT
angel8arts( 61) $110.03 Oct-11-03 08:33:15 PDT
crowkelly( 102) $94.50 Oct-12-03 17:25:20 PDT
huffycat( 37) $78.89 Oct-11-03 08:42:36 PDT
jewelrypalace( 12) $64.00 Oct-10-03 19:52:09 PDT
angel8arts( 61) $55.02 Oct-05-03 09:30:12 PDT
jewelrypalace( 12) $50.00 Oct-10-03 19:51:46 PDT
jewelrypalace( 12) $48.00 Oct-10-03 19:51:21 PDT
sogno_jewels( 50) $11.00 Oct-07-03 09:04:34 PDT
vbshoward( 71) $10.00 Oct-03-03 21:26:29 PDT
kbalch@saci.org( 44) $7.77 Oct-03-03 13:58:12 PDT
bbchina( 328) $3.23 Oct-03-03 18:26:29 PDT

Sure I was outbid....but had my bid been placed properly, the other bidder would not have had time to raise their bids.....this is why I use AUCTION SNIPER.
And I really expected an explaination of why my bid was not placed properly... not a graphic display of the bids on the auction.

quote:

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Originally posted by lifeofryley:

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Auction:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2662222729

quote:

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Originally posted by crawfishcharlie:
And I really expected an explaination of why my bid was not placed properly... not a graphic display of the bids on the auction.

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Sorry , but I thought that might help someone else figure out what happened.

crawfish & life-of-ryley




image provided by Mrs. M.

Sunday 7pm is probably the busiest hour on eBay of all week. We measure eBay lag and bid accordingly. Auctions that end EXACTLY on the hour at such times typically take eBay 30-60 seconds to process.

If we didnt measure and bid such as this most bids at such times would be missed. While this does occassionally end up with early bids it is far outweighed by the number of bids that would make it in too late and thus wouldnt be entered at all. At least this way your highest bid has a chance to do it's work.

We're in a lose-lose sitation here. Place early so they get in and people complain. Place them when they ask and they dont get placed in time because eBay is running slow and they complain. There are probably 100 messages on missed bids here for every 2-3 about early bids at such times. It's unfortunate, but as long as eBay allows sellers to schedule auctions, and as long as sellers all list them EXACTLY on hours and half hours this will be the case.

Thank you for the explaination. It makes perfect sense. This is all I asked for....as I said, I have been very pleased with AUCTION SNIPER and will continue to use it.

Crawfishcharlie

It doesn't to me, in fact it is a pretty lame explanation as to why you placed my bid almost a MINUTE early.

Hi,
My commiserations lifeofryley. It does look like your snipe might have succeeded if it had gone in after 19.59.31! It is also noticeable that your winning bidder made a rather panicky reaction bid in 17 seconds, raising their maximum by over $17! Making sure a bid arrives within the last 17 seconds at that time is tough, but apparently it can make a difference.

However, this seems surprising behaviour for an experienced bidder. It is possible that his bid at 19.59.31 was an automated snipe, that he changed his mind about his maximum and bid the final bid manually. In that case, the timing of your bid made no difference.

Actually, you can see that she made a bid that was in reaction to my early snipe, and it was too low. She then placed another bid and won. If my snipe had gone in when it should have, I would have won.

This is my last post on this

The problem I have with this service is not the fact that you screwed up, it is the fact that you are blaming others for the shortcomings of this system.

"It's unfortunate, but as long as eBay allows sellers to schedule auctions, and as long as sellers all list them EXACTLY on hours and half hours this will be the case.".

Sorry, but that just isn't good enough!!!!

[This message was edited by Sniper Sara B. on October 13, 2003 at 01:14 PM.]

quote:

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Sorry, but that just isn't good enough!!!!

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Which is worse? A snipe early or one that isnt placed? In one case you lose 100% of the time. In the other you win nearly all the time as well.

How many times have we failed you in the past? 131 snipes, how many? 0 in your last 51 that I pulled up. If you dont like how we place snipes exactly on the hour and half hour then do them manually then. I guarentee that if you do enough of them you'll switch back to using us because you'll miss to many. But before changing to someone else when we've always placed 100% of your snipes I'd at least consider that.

Had we placed your snipe at 5 seconds and eBay was running slow like they are 99% of the time at 7pm on Sunday your snipe would not have made it in time.

I'm sorry you feel the way you do and I understand your decision, but we're not going to place snipes on time that will lose thousands of more snipes a night, than they will save by not allowing a competitor to rethink their price and rebid a higher one at peak eBay times. We'd be losing thousands more to win just a few dozen more. And anywhere you go that does it otherwise is putting your snipes in jeoprady.

As I said, we're in a lose/lose situation. If you think it'll be better elsewhere you'll find you are mistaken. I will challenge anyone or site on this, given 1000 snipes over each of the next 4 weeks at each half hour increment on Sunday evening between 6pm and 8:30pm. Us to place them as we do, and anyone else placing them with 5 seconds. I'll give $1000 out of my own pocket if you can win more than we do by placing them then.

I have statics available to me on thousands of snipes a day, and what we do works. Unless you place a thousand snipes all at 7pm Sunday over a long period of time you cant say for certain whether your change has made any difference. This is an open forum. Look how many complaints we have. Very few considering the astronomical number of snipes we place a day. We've got things right. But yes, a few do lose and yours was one of them which we regret.

[This message was edited by Sniper Sara B. on October 13, 2003 at 01:47 PM.]

I agree...no doubt the snipes were place early due to heavy eBay traffic. I just joined recently and I'm already aware of this fact. If you put in a bid too close to the auction's end on a Sunday evening, it won't make it in time. So that's why AS tries to bid a bit ahead of time for you. Otherwise, it just won't go through. Sometimes AS bids a few seconds before I want...but that's fine with me, considering that other bidders can't constantly be refreshing their page, and chances are they won't outbid you and have time to notice or react. On Sunday nights, if you feel safer manually outbidding at the last second, then feel free to do so. So far I haven't had any major bid placement problems using this service.

*~samuraiblossom~*

quote:

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If you put in a bid too close to the auction's end on a Sunday evening, it won't make it in time.

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Yes, and most notably auctions that end exactly on the hour or half hour as that one did. Such snipes must often be placed 30-50 seconds ahead of time or they wont get to eBay in time because eBay is so slow.

So what do we do? Place the hundreds of snipes that happen on the hour on a Sunday at their requested 5 second lead and lose all those hundreds if eBay is slow, or adjust based on our measurements of eBays current speed and make sure the snipes get in.

We obviously want to try and get them in as shortly before the auction as we can, yet still make sure they get in in time.

All I can say is you have to trust our judgement on this. Most of you are doing 10-20 snipes a month. We're doing that many in a minute. We have the knowledge, experience, and stats to do the best job of sniping for you.

quote:

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On Sunday nights, if you feel safer manually outbidding at the last second, then feel free to do so.

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Sure thing, if you are around go ahead and so a manual snipe to be safe.

If you dont like how we place snipes exactly on the hour and half hour then do them manually then. I guarentee that if you do enough of them you'll switch back to using us because you'll miss to many.

quote:

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Originally posted by lifeofryley:

The problem I have with this service is not the fact that you screwed up, it is the fact that you are blaming others for the shortcomings of this system.

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The problem I have with this post (and others like it) is the "loaded and ready to fire, take no prisoners" rudeness with which it makes its first appearance in the forum.

[edited only to make the quotation work]

[This message was edited by Sniper Sara B. on October 13, 2003 at 05:02 PM.]

Just to clarify for those newbies and others who don't understand about the 1/4, 1/2, and on-the hour issue. Many large-volume sellers use listing programs and can schedule their listings to be uploaded at a specific time. The time-frames are broken up into quarter hour segments. You can't schedule your listings to upload at 12:38, for example. But you can at 12:00, 12:15, 12:30, 12:45, 1:00, etc. That is why those timeframes are busier than others... especially Sunday evening which is considered the most ideal day/time to start and close auctions. During an approximate 2-3 timeframe thousands of sellers auctions are being uploaded to eBay!

So, even if eBay wasn't wreaking all kinds of havoc with all their new feature uploads and then the hours and processing-time they spend fixing what they broke, and server problems, etc, traffic would still be heavier on Sunday evenings. Add to that all the trouble eBay has been having lately, and the response time is even worse that it has been in the past.

There is only so much AS or any sniper program can do to try to anticipate what eBay response-time is going to be like at any given time. They can rely on past statistics and newly-gathered statistics, which is what I think AS is trying to do by adding even more lead time than they normally have in the past.

For those "must-have" auctions, manually sniping in addition to AS may be the best plan until things calm down... which may be a long time considering all the changes eBay plans over this and the following year.

Hope that helps.

diva (aka Dag)

I'm curious, Dag,

Why is Sunday night regarded as the best time to end auctions when it's so busy? I realise that this is rather like the old question about why farmers always put their gates in the muddiest parts of fields but there must be a percieved advantate to ending an auction at that time.

The only one I can think of is that if a seller has a job, then he or she will be around on Sunday to take bids coming in, but surely if your high bidders all contact you on Sunday, then you've got a lot of wrapping up and stamp-sticking to get done before Monday so that you can send your stuff out....

Am I missing something here?

SuperSqueaky

BTW, please excuse my spelling - I'm blaming my bad back for restricting the movement of my fingers!

SS

Ummm...aren't we all forgetting the primary rule of any kind of auction bidding and/or sniping?

BID THE ABSOLUTE MAXIMUM AMOUNT THAT YOU CAN/WILL PAY FOR AN ITEM!

If you do that, then you are guaranteed of one of two results; assuming the bid is accepted in time by eBay:

1) Either you win the auction BECAUSE YOU HAVE THE HIGHEST BID,

OR,

2) You lose the auction because somebody else could afford to pay more than you!

Example: If an item starts at $10.00 and you put your max bid at $100.00 (because that is truly all you can afford before you start deciding what bills to pay or if the children will eat that week) and somebody outbids you and wins it for, say, $120.00. Well, you did the best you could do! Now if you REALLY could have been able to afford $150.00 for it...well, you should have placed your max at $150.00.

Somehow the point is frequently lost on here that "sometimes you're just not going to win!" I have had the 'good fortune' to have discovered just who some of my competitors are on some of the items I collect...and guess what? One is the head of a huge corporation and another is a celebrity. Now if they really want something that I am bidding on, odds are they are going to get it as their wallets are just bigger. I tend to luck out when it is an item that they already have or maybe they missed it in their searches. That is one of the main reasons I use AS...so that I do not show them an auction they may have missed (as I know we all do searches on each other to see what we're all up to!)

Don't forget that AS just merely helps to improve your odds; it's not a guarantee.

WarriorNun

"If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning"

LOL good question.

Well, first off it is just what the statistics seem to show. Everywhere I go, when someone posts a question as to when is the best time to list and end their auctions, Sunday is always at least one of the answers.

The reasoning given is that Sunday afternoons and evenings are the days most people (buyers) are at home relaxing in front of the computer.

diva (aka Dag)

Warriornun, well put.

I think its often the case that because we use AuctionSniper, we somehow feel that we are guaranteed to win.

I admit, having a bid placed earlier than expected, allowing a competitor to scoop us is frustrating, but I agree with you, if a person was willing to pay as much as the auction sold for, they probably should have bid that amount instead of the amount they did that caused them to lose the auction.

-bjt

Warriornun, well put.

I think its often the case that because we use AuctionSniper, we somehow feel that we are guaranteed to win.

I admit, having a bid placed earlier than expected, allowing a competitor to scoop us is frustrating, but I agree with you, if a person was willing to pay as much as the auction sold for, they probably should have bid that amount instead of the amount they did that caused them to lose the auction.

-bjt

OOps!
sorry about the double post - I don't have my edit/delete function activated.





-bjt

Billie (aka bjt)

Love your doggie. Don't understand why you can't change/delete ?

Rick, for some reason, those features are not on her program!! Weird, huh?

Mrs. M

Very weird. SPOOKY. H A L L O W E E N

SuperSqueaky, it's because most people are at home on a Sunday night so sellers can expect to receive maximum exposure/interest and bids on their items. It's the auction equivalent of prime-time TV.

I always plan my auctions to end on a Sunday evening around 7pm-8pm for these reasons. ebay.co.uk recently offered sellers the chance to schedule listings at 00.00, 00.15, 00.30, 00.45 for 1 penny instead of the usual 12 pennies. So they know how much sellers like to schedule listings.

As a seller I tend not to use scheduled timings because of the overload. (I list in 'real time' and plan my auctions to end within my preferred timeframe of 7pm-8pm.) As a buyer I have lost many auctions because of this overload - with and without Auction Sniper. I wish Ebay would get rid of scheduled listings. Sometimes at on these quarter hour intervals it seems the whole site grinds to a halt.

Well, it is obvious that AS isn't perfect. Would you all have been happier if they were upfront about it and said that your snipes were especially vulnerable on Sunday's? I mean, it's too bad that you missed out on something you really wanted, but you really are asking AS for something that isn't in their power to give. You may as well ask them for straight teeth.

LOL, will these do?

Mrs. M

Good one, Mrs. M.