Help understanding currencies please

What was the item number? Although you may have been bidding on ebay.com.au, are you sure that this wasn't a US auction that was also avaliable in Australia?
Andrew

Or, it could have been a sale by an Australian seller whose asking price was made in terms of US dollars. I see that often in the case of British or Canadian sellers.

When I view the item through ebay.com.au it looks 'normal'. When I snipe it, then look at the item through my list of current snipes [c;licking on the title] I get it as an ebay.com listing, with the Austraklian dollars coinverted in US [in red] and auction sniper is bidding in US dollars.

[hope that makes sense]

any suggestions?

Nigel Lane

The auction is in Australian dollars, and AS will snipe in the currency of the auction. That's why you don't see a $ or £ sign when you set up a snipe...just a number with two decimal places. The red number conversion you see is eBay's, done as a convenience to persons using eBay in the USA.

Thats what I thought - BUT - can you explain why my snipe didn't 'expire' as being too low - that is the current bid was higher than my snipe [in Aussie Dollars]. It appears that it was still current because Auction Sniper had converted it to the red US dollar figure.

I just don't want to bid a Aussie price and Sniper assume it is a US price.

Or is it that the expire/underbid feature doesn't work with other currencies and that Sniper will place just the nominated figure in the 'local' currency?

Nigel Lane

From AS' faq:

31. How come I’m outbid but my snipe doesn’t know it yet?

We check if you are outbid in certain waves. This is a HUGE bandwidth waster and costs us money, so we do it the most economical way we can:

If the item ends within 30 min, we may check 10 every min
If the item ends in an hour, we may check every 20 min
If the item ends in a day, we may check every 12 hours
If the item ends in 7 days, we may not check yet.
Please note that you can click on View Extended Info just above your snipes, and it will give you this information immediately, so you're only one click away from the info you want.

As someone who uses AS to snipe on ebay.co.uk all the time I can confirm that it definitely works as it is described, that is if an item is listed in pounds sterling then the numbers I put into AS go ahead as a pounds sterling bid. There are a minority of auctions on ebay.co.uk which get listed in US dollars (I eventually found out that in most cases it is due to the seller using some US-written listing package) and in those cases the number I enter into AS gets bid as a US dollar bid.

I have come a cropper (does that phrase exist in the US?) when I've not noticed that an ebay.co.uk auction is in dollars, and I've just entered say 100.00 meaning the item was worth 100 pounds to me; there being approx 1.6 USD to GBP then I've lost those auctions because my bid only went in as 100 USD; had I noticed the auction being in USD then I should have entered 160.00. Ooops. Punish myself by running into a few brick walls.

IanN asks, "I have come a cropper (does that phrase exist in the US?)...."

Yes, although it's infrequently used.