High bidder, but beaten by bid increment

smacb, to the forum.

Remember that you don't always know how much you lost an auction by. The winners true max is often unknown. You can only be sure of the high bid if it is less than one bid increment above second highest bidder.

The hardest part of using AS effectivly is determining your max amount. Not your starting max or medium max, but your REAL max. Why would you want to pay more than the maximum you were willing to pay?

Don't bid for a bargain and hope to win. Instead bid for a win and hope for a bargain.

... again WELCOME... hope to see you post again.

Work around / fix

Add one dollar to your absolute max, and it will never happen again!

Hi, Thanks!
I get what you're saying. Perhaps I didn't explain very well. Perhaps I won't again What I'm trying to say, is that, for instance I place a snipe at $50. Somewhere along the line someone has placed a proxy bid at $49.68. Although I have placed a higher bid, it doesn't get placed because the next bid increment of $1 would be $50.68. If I had been bidding manually, and could do all that is required in the remaining 4 seconds, I'd be willing to put in an extra $1 to ensure my bid gets placed. OK, if my snipe bid is still too low, fair enough, I can live with that.
Your workaround/fix is sort of ok, I guess, but in the scenario I'm trying to explain you'd go on forever! I increase my snipe to $51, next bid increment $1 on a max proxy of $51.68, so snipe doesn't get placed. I have lost a few items now this way by a matter of less than 50 cents
My idea would work something like this.........
Enter your max snipe amount, $50. Enter "bid incrementer buffer" amount, $1. Let AS do its stuff. Max bid before snipe is $49.68 (in this case bid wouldn't normally be placed. "Bid increment too low"), however with the all new buffer........item won at $50.68

Clear as mud to me now.
Sorry for going on a bit...
Steve

That would be cool, but it won't work. AS wouldn't have enough time to parse the "bid too low" message from ebay and resubmit the bid using the new bid, especially if ebay is running slow. You say that you could do it manually, but on one of ebay's slow periods, your first snipe woudn't get there in time, much less the second.

Don't get me wrong. I think it would make a great feature. I just don't think it could be pulled off in the short time before the close of the auction. It it would work, then great!

smacb,
and welcome to the forum!

quote:

---

Originally posted by Bartelby: Enter your max snipe amount, $50. Enter "bid incrementer buffer" amount, $1. Let AS do its stuff. Max bid before snipe is $49.68 (in this case bid wouldn't normally be placed. "Bid increment too low"), however with the all new buffer........item won at $50.68

---

Why wouldnt you just bid $51.27 (or similar) to start off with?

If you were beat out by a few cents, you essentially didnt bid your MAXIMUM Max bid.

There is a competitor sniping program that allows increments like you suggested but you have to submit your first snipe at 30-40 secs or more and then it resnipes in user defined increments for up to 3 times. Of course if proxy bidder is too high you don't win but it does give one a feeling giving ones best effort in a losing cause. LOL

Hi, Thanks for all your responses. I guess you're right. If I dont place a high enough bid, then I lose the auction. It's just so annoying when you get the AS end of auction message "Bid not placed, bid increment too low" (or something like that), only to find out the next day that although your snipe was for $50, the item sold for $49.68
If it was an item I really wanted, I'd bid just that little bit more to get the next increment registered, win or lose. And if I lose, at least I know that I made the winner pay an extra dollar

But you never know what the high bid was. If the winner won for $49.68, you don't know what he actually bid; it could have been $250!

Gonna stick my nose in.

I don't think the actual high bid is the point of the original post. If smacb had been out bid by a value higher than his max, this thread would never have been started.

Further to that, is there any way to determine what the bid increment is for an auction?

D

quote:

---

is there any way to determine what the bid increment is for an auction?

---

Yes, >Click Here<

Thanks a bunch! got it, printed it, nailing it to the wall.

D.