I just want to add another voice to the request for contingency planning.
I use AS fairly regularly, and bid groups are a great feature. I've regularly come across combos of items that I wished I could use a contingency bidding feature on, but only today did I manage to get motivated enough to search through the AS site to see if I could do it. That's when I came across this thread.
How many other customers are out there wishing they had the same feature, but don't make the effort to ask for it, or hunt the site?
I often come across groups of items that a bidder has for sale that are linked. e.g the items that prompted me to look today were a set of roof bars for a car, and a set of ski brackets for said roof bars. The seller has posted the items a couple of minutes apart, and at an anti-social time of night. I dont mind getting the roof bars (1st item to complete) without the ski brackets, but the ski brackets are completely useless without the former. I dont want to stay up half the night to watch the auctions to cancel my second bid if the first doesnt win.
Please reconsider developing this! I'm sure it could be implemented in a very similar way to bid groups, to keep it simple, but with the different logic behind. (i.e. only bid for the second item if the first wins, instead of only bid for the second item if the first doesnt win)