Can someone tell if you are using AS?

None of it sounds suspicious on the face of it. The reason why each auction was lost for exactly 50 cents is almost certainly the fact that that is the "bid increment"--the minimum increment by which ebay will bump up the bidding--and so that is not suspicious at all. (The winning bidder's maximum bid was probably higher than yours by more than 50 cents.) The second chance offer may well have been based on precisely your losing maximum, which obviously happens to be synonymous with your max snipe amount, but anyway it is, naturally, visible to the seller. The one thing to be wary of, I would think, is to be sure it is not a scam second chance offer--check to see it is in your ebay mailbox. See other thread on this too.

The other bidders may have been using AS, or they may have been sniping manually. (Or did they place their bids before you and this is a case of ebay proxy bidding?)

Basically, I suspect you probably just need to get familiar with bid increments in the proxy bidding system of ebay. This is explained at the ebay help page, and you can dp a search for numerous clarifications on this board as well. If I've misunderstood your problem, sorry.

hart,

I would think the main issue here is if “you” feel the price of the second chance offer is fair. I know most people will disagree with me, but even if something illegit is going on, assuming the item is accurately described and the seller has good feedback, shouldn’t it boil down to whether you agree to the purchase price?

After looking closely at the auctions and the bidding....something that I normally don't do (as I usually either win outright or don't care if I lose)....it looks like two of the items were proxy bids (maybe sniped), and the third was definitely a snipe. The eBay messages about that looked to be right on.

The seller did actually send the messages via eBay, so it's a legit second chance offer.

The bid increment part now makes sense (again, never really paid attention or cared).

Part of it was also the way that AS padded the snipes (it looks like almost up to a minute early).

The message here was just because how it went down/felt, something didn't seem right. And, turns out that, apparently, I may be right.....but not about the proxy bidding/AS part.

The articles for sale look to be copied/duplicated, based on comparisons with other similar auctions, and some of the feedback.

Thanks for the insight.

Er, all 3 were 'snipes', as most people understand the term here: 'sniping' just means bidding towards the very end. ('proxy bidding' is what ebay does for you, upping your disclosed bid towards your maximum as subsequent bids come in; that's not happened there.) The third one that you say was 'definitely a snipe'--I assume you refer to the Snow White item--was a snipe no more nor less than the other 2. And Snow White could have been either manual or automatic, like the others.

Yeah you've got a point about AS bidding early--there's a lot of undesirable flex in the exact timing. In your 3 auctions, 2 snipes seem to have been placed 14 and 29 seconds before close. Poor, but could be worse. Sometimes snipes go in early by longer, upwards of a minute (maybe once in 10 snipes, in my own experience), or several minutes, or reportedly even hours, which ticks off people no end. I get the sense there's a Taoist school on this (accept it, be at one with AS), I'd side with the Reformist school (why in hell can't they do better).

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Can someone tell if you are using AS?

As long as you turn of AS’s InstaMail option, then there is no way for ANYONE to know you’ve used AS, and even the InstaMail option is only activated AFTER the auction ends.

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Originally posted by Rick:

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Can someone tell if you are using AS?

As long as you turn of AS’s InstaMail option, then there is no way for ANYONE to know you’ve used AS, and even the InstaMail option is only activated AFTER the auction ends.

(except AS Admins and eBay themselves! )

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(except AS Admins and eBay themselves! )

There is no way for eBay to know this.

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There is no way for eBay to know this.

Although I by no means claim an intimate knowledge of the topology of the AS network, it stands to reason that it would be possible for a persistent and clued-up observer with access to eBay server logs to figure out which bids had been entered from AS servers.

I'm not saying there's someone sitting there in San Jose watching for AS-sourced traffic, merely that it is within the realms of technical possibility