Catey wrote:
"I do expect Auction Sniper to be reliable. I will accept that it's not 100%, 100% of the time.
I'd just like to be told if it's known why my bid failed."
I've been using AS successfully for months now, and have been very happy with it.
In the last 2 days, however, there have been 9 foiled AS snipes, doing nothing that I haven't done over previous months, with success.
Yesterday I had 5 snipes up of the same item. They were timed far enough apart that I could go in and cancel them if I won one. I didn't use bid groups because I was present to watch the auctions and cancel them if need be. I have done this many times with success.
But this time, a few minutes before the auction closing, I tried to cancel 4 snipes because I had won the item in the first auction. I got the message that the snipes couldn't be cancelled at this time. I continued trying to cancel the bids until the final auction had ended, without success. AS placed all the bids and I won 5 pairs of identical shoes.
Today I decided not to take any chances and put a different set of 5 identical items in one bid group with the option to keep 2, and 2 other identical items in another bid group with the option to keep 1.
Taking the usual precautions to see if the auctions closed during a heavy-traffic period in any time zone so as to allow additional time, I found that none of them did, so I set a 7-second lead time, which almost always translates into 9 seconds.
This time all the items in my 5-item bid group were returned with the message that the bid wasn't placed in time. I had set my max well above the final price of all these items, by the way.
In the bid group that had two items, I had a proxy outbid, and the other item went in with 7 seconds lead, bid results showed 9 seconds, but another sniper got in at 6 seconds and won the auction. Her winning bid was lower than the amount I had set. AS functioned properly in this case, but my 7-second lead time wasn't long enough.
I have to share Catey's and others' concerns about why some of these snipes are failing. If I were new to AS I would have written these 9 incidents over the last two days off as either an error on my part or simple net congestion, but I am not. Why did these 9 snipes fail in the last two days, having done nothing I haven't done with success in all the months prior?
Are there times when AS is down or experiencing technical difficulties that we are not being made aware of? Is there another explanation why none of the 5 snipes in a bid group were placed in time, and AS failed to cancel those 4 bids?
Thank you,
Lawren
[This message was edited by Lawren on August 27, 2003 at 08:02 PM.]
[This message was edited by Lawren on August 27, 2003 at 08:09 PM.]