Angry

Craig,

I know how you feel, I lost out too. Turns out the system was down for about two hours and they didn't feel the need to notify anyone. They posted messages on the message boards telling people to manually bid on items, but of course no body could access the web site to see the message board. Pretty poor planning on their part. I doubt that I will try this again.

quote:

I was a good customer for auctionsniper.

If you were indeed a good cutomer, then surely you know that this is an extremely rare occurrence and is in no way a typical AS incident, as AS is nothing if not reliable. As such, you would chalk it up to a freak development. Moreover, AS will always give credits for missed snipes.

If, on the other hand, you were not as good a customer for AS, then I suppose that there is little to be said here.

I agree , it certainly would have been nice to have been informed that auctionsniper was down and I suppose it really is something that they should implement. Afterall, we are paying customers.

I had a couple more auctions up for sniping tonight but i've decided to delete them and do it manually. I didn't really have the time to do this, but at least then I can guarantee I will stand some sort of chance of winning the auctions.

In reply to the second poster, I was a good customer as i'm sure an auctionsniper representative would vouch. I must have been using the service for just over a year now and yes it is usually reliable. But I am very peed off that I missed out on an absolute bargain tonight and wasn't informed of the outage.

If you want to see how peed off I was, go to comments and suggestion forum under "re: missed item" and check out the e-mail I sent to customer support.

You have been a customer for over a year, obviously pleased with the service, as you have been using it for a long time. And you are going to stop using the service because of a single incident, when otherwise you were happy?

Somehow that does not seem to make sense.

When I posted the message I was really really peed off. I'm beginning to relax a little now, and i'll probably have forgotten about it in the morning. Just fuming that I missed out on a tidy bit of profit from the auction in question.

Seriously, I don't know why AS do not email users when the system goes down. It would save me whinging for a start, and I can imagine their help desk is probably getting an awful lot of emails at the moment too!

quote:

Seriously, I don't know why AS do not email users when the system goes down.

We can't connect to our own systems to do anything about it. They are 200 miles away in the Bay Area on a fat internet connection in racks close to eBay Unfortunately the company we use that gives us that connection was rewiring something I guess and broke things. I'm not sure exactly, but they called us only after things went down. Usually when they are going to do work they call us in advance.

We're putting some extra stuff into our backup systems that place bid from other places to extend the amount of time they are capable of making emergency bids in this sitation. Next time this happens we'll be able to have our colo fail for 24 hours before we miss a bid. Hopefully it wont come to that.

It's a tricky situation because then what do you do if someone wants to cancel a bid? Should we place them? If we do the people that still want them will be very happy, but the ones who wanted to cancel a bid will be equally as mad as those who would have missed the bid.

I also lost out on some great bargins. However,
this is the first time this has ever happened.
I have won more items since using this site than any other snipe sites I have tried.

There were also problems on the EBay site and several other sites I visited. Wonder if this had something to do with the new virus out there.

Sometimes there are things that are just out of their control. Rather than slam them, it may be more helpful to provide them with any suggestions you may have

I think this is a great company and I will continue to use and support this site as I know they will work to do everything they can to address these types of situations.

AndiA, welcome to our forum! I, personally have won many auctions at great prices through AS. I see no reason for them not to do their best when it is in their control. It certainly is big bucks out of their pocket when things like this happen. You may very well be right that it was linked to preparing to ward off the new virus. But whatever happened, it was not just on this site. I agree with your reply.

There’s always a chance, no matter how small, that a snipe won’t get placed. For must have items, where money is no object, proxy bids are still the best way to go (even ebay has down-times). There’s a certain risk with sniping that seems more than compensated by the rewards.

Thanks Kevin for the explaination and support above in "News and Updates".