lag time

I'm a newbie too, but understand that you need to extend your lead time when eBay traffic is heavy like Sunday PM PST. IIRC, from other thread, unday PM's lead time s/b 15-18 secs. I"d speculate that eBay didn't have time to react due to server overload so your bid didn't get entered.

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What happened?

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AS monitors, in real time, web traffic and calculates (with a little guess work thrown in using historical data) how much time it should take to enter and get a response to a bid. Some days and times it will take much longer than others... like Sunday evenings on an exact quarter hour. Some of us choose to add even more lead time manually to be doubly sure. That's where the 15-18 seconds comes from during busy times.

AS determined your 5 second lead time was too short, and your bid would not have made it to eBay before the end of auction.

That's why your bid was placed early.

I would rather my bid be placed early than not at all. Some strongly disagree, but it really is the lesser of two evils. If your bid is placed early, you still have a chance to win (maybe less of a chance but still a chance). If your bid had been sent at 5 seconds it would not have made it in time, giving you zero chance to win.

One final note... bids placed this late in an auction are usually planned well in advance (like yours was) and would have been placed no matter when, or even if, yours went in. You may simply have lost anyway to a higher bid.

WELCOME to the forum.

Experiment: Try placing a bid at 39 seconds from the end. Not easy! So it's likely that those bids would have arrived anyway. If their max was higher than your max then you lose. The item's bound to appear again...

R2

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Experiment: Try placing a bid at 39 seconds from the end. Not easy!

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An excellent experiment a try. 39 seconds might seem like a lifetime, but it’s a nerve racking one (at least for me). You’re watching the auction getting ready to place your manual snipe. You have the bid history in one window and your snipe ready in another window (obviously you are already signed-on). You’re refreshing the bid history like crazy keeping an eye on the bid amount and number of bids and the remaining seconds. You see someone place a snipe 39 seconds before closing. What do you do? Snipe early afraid the other guy will retaliate, or wait and be afraid your snipe won’t be high enough? (QUICK! The atomic clock is ticking.). Do you snipe you’re original amount, or try to change it? If you don’t change it, then your snipe doesn’t make any difference to the “premature” (39-seconds) sniper. If you change it you have to decide how much you are going to snipe (QUICK! The atomic clock is ticking.). Enter the snipe amount (be sure to have a window available for bidding, and be sure you click on the right window – oops wrong window). Verify the new snipe amount (QUICK! The atomic clock is ticking.) You don’t want to enter 1199 instead of 119.90. Click on “Continue”. Wait. Confirm your bid. Find the damn “Submit” button, and then click on it. Wait for your bid to be registered by ebay. Are you high bidder or no? If no, hope you have time to repeat the entire process (QUICK! The atomic clock is ticking). Remember, you haven’t had a lot of time (only a few seconds) to think about how much more you are willing to spend. You might go nuclear in the frenzy, but you might just nibble-snipe your way. All the time you are doing this you are missing Survivors. But, if you don’t have a stroke, you’ll feel *like* a survivor. That scenario may just be what the other guys were going thru, assuming that they retaliated to your 39 second snipe.

The conclusion I came to? It’s very hard to place retaliatory snipes – but that may just be me.