Reply to "Snipe Did Not Happen, no explaination in sniper email"

Lawren, your post describes two different sets of circumstances, one involving cancelling individual snipes and the other involving bid group items. First, you say that you have been setting up individual snipes for similar items and then cancelling later ones when you have won the quantity desired. Then, following the same technique, you tried to cancel 4 out of 5 items because you won the first item, but you couldn't cancel out of the others. That's because AS "locks in" an item and queues it up for a bid with three minutes remaining in the auction. At that point, a snipe cannot be modified or cancelled. Evidently, the four snipes you wanted to cancel were within three minutes or less of closing, and so you weren't allowed to cancel your bids on them.

With respect to the bid group problem, AS asks that bid group items have closing times at least 30 seconds apart so that bids can be placed successfully. It's only a guess, but it appears that some or all of the items you selected for the bid group did not meet that criterion, and AS was unable to place your bids in time for them to be registered by eBay. The situation with the second bid group of two you described could happen at any time...one proxy outbid and the other outbid by another sniper. I'm positive that the other sniper was placing a bid independent of your snipe and that he or she was not reacting to your bid just because it went in 2 seconds earlier than you had set it for. In other words, you just plain got outbid on that one.

I can only suggest that, if you continue your practice of setting up individual snipes for similar items and cancelling those you no longer wish to bid on, you ensure you will have enough time to cancel them with 5 minutes or more left in the auctions. That will give you a margin of safety so that you don't wind up buying 5 similar items when you only want one. And apparently you were unaware of the 30-second criterion for bid groups, so that problem should not recur if you pay close attention to the closing times of the items in the bid group folder.