Missed Snipe!

Linda, was the snipe set for an auction that ended on Sunday, particularly Sunday evening? If so, 15 seconds lead would often be insufficient to get through the logjam in eBay's computers at that time of the week and day. But if you'll give me the item number I'll take a look and try to find out what happened.

Basically eBay was extremely slow last night. We were often sniping 40 seconds in advance and they still werent being accepted in time. It's purely an eBay issue. Nothing to do with our site or the internet speed or such. About the only thing we could do is snipe even further in advance but that has it's own drawbacks. We try and present the best balance between lead times and snipes making it.

We have a page for free snipes in the event your is missed. It works both when it is and isnt our fault per se.

http://www.auctionsniper.com/freeSnipes.aspx

Ebay was not moving slowly Sunday night for me.But, I am on high speed internet.

I was on line most of the evening on eBay and had no problem. And, after all this time I have never had a problem before. Now, maybe that was luck.

But, if I have to use a greater lead time I might as well do it manually?

Thanks for your response.

Linda

Linda Hall

I was online working in ebay Sunday from early evening until late Monday morning. I noticed slow response time, and I often got errors on searches, adding or revising listings, sending questions to sellers, etc. The errors went away on a retry or 2.

In the meantime I popped in here now and then and noticed people were starting to post about missed snipes. It was not a mystery to me based on what I was seeing on ebay. I have a cable modem myself.

Anyway, I had already posted in other forums in reply to a few people stating I suspected missed snipes were due to ebay issues... guess my suspicions were correct.

In addition to it being the busiest day and time of the week, I think ebay is doing upgrades for the ongoing Half.com transition which is due to complete next summer. They have been rolling out little "features" and I noticed some new changes today when I added some new listings. So I think they may be compounding an already bad situation by what they are doing behind the scenes.

diva (aka Dag)

Hello -- !!

I agree ebay must be doing something differently of late. I've won a couple hundred snipes using a 3 second lead time but lost a real good one this afternoon that ended at 1:30pm... Monday!

Looking over my snipes lost page there have been half dozen or so "too late" reports in the last couple weeks.

3 sec. was working just fine for me this past year until now. (although I've noticed in bid histories that most of my snipes were placed at 5 sec before closing, even with the 3 sec lead)

Thats my 11 cents worth..

Thank you and best wishes,
BDS

I guess I couldn't argue with all of those sucessful snipes you have had, big Steve, but Ebay is coming into the busy season now. As a seller, I can see the traffic increase. I have never used less than 8 seconds at any time. Summer months are normally slow auction months, picking up in early fall, considerably.

rsmiller40

I have recently read some of the posts regarding lead times and the increased traffic on eBay.

I have decided to increase my lead times from 8 seconds to 20 seconds for any auction ending on Sunday, and perhaps to a 15 second lead for the rest of the week.

I'm still comfortable with that. Before AS, I was sniping manually at 30 seconds and winning auctions, so I'm still better off.

To be honest, I feel a little uncomfortable using the "get a free snipe" link. Following some of the advice I've seen on the message boards, I set up my snipe for 15 seconds, figuring that it was Sunday, and not on the quarter-hour.

Sunday was a very bad day, so my snipe didn't go through. Yes, eBay looked pretty responsive to me. But apparently not so responsive to AS.

So is it AS's fault? eBay's fault? My fault?

I really don't have any choice but to trust AS's admins to have enough logging and timestamping to show that eBay was slow. So it's not AS's fault, and it's not eBay's fault.

Mea culpa... next time I'll know better and try 45 seconds.

45 seconds seems like a long time for sniping. I think someone could easily place a manual bid against you. I'd like to get some opinions of some long-timers like Steve and Rick.

rsmiller40

I'm not sure this will be helpful, but the following are two posts from AS support:

>>> CLICK HERE # 1 <<<

>>> CLICK HERE # 2 <<<

I have been just fat, dumb and happy for a long time with my snipes. I have always used 15 seconds, bid my highest price and I have never had a problem. (And usually I win them!)

I respect you all. My experience is less. But, eBay was not running slow for me - Snipe was. I could not even get the Snipe to post without a problem. Never had had this happen before!

So, in my very limited experience my problem was not ebay. Also, Snipe report did not say that my bid went in late. Just said I didn't get it. Second reason I believe it was Snipe.

BUT! The lesson is a good one. I will now do manual bids when I think there is slow response. Or, I will bid with longer lead time and just not worry about it.

As I said earlier, I have 500+ Snipes and never a problem. I think that is pretty good 1 out of 500+, huh?

Just wish I had known before that it is not infallible!

Snipes have saved me tons of money. And, I very seldom lost one: Because I put in my highest price.

Thanks for all of your comments. I have never been in chat room before. You were so helpful. I no longer see the site as just a computer program!

Thanks again!

Linda Hall

Rick,

I read the posts, but I'm getting a mixed message.

On the one hand, everyone says to increase the snipe time on Sundays and on the quarter hour.

On the other hand, here we have these posts from AS saying that they adjust everyone's snipe time based on the current eBay delay.

So on the one hand, why adjust one's snipe time at all if AS does all the work in adjusting for eBay delay?

On the other hand, why all the missed snipe reports if AS does all the work in adjusting for eBay delay?

The only conclusion I can draw is that AS either does NOT adjust for eBay delay, or that they do so inconsistently, or using a flawed algorithm.

We'll never know, because AS probably won't tell us in detail their algorithm So I guess it's up to us to know what the eBay delay is, and to adjust our snipe times accordingly.

I, for one, just adjusted my delays up from 8 seconds to 15 seconds, just in case.

In one of the links I left above Sara said, "we're doing thousands of snipes a day" (that was posted 6 months ago). I'm assuming "thousands" means somewhere between 2,000 and 9,999 per day. That would mean somewhere between 60,000 to 299,970 snipes per month. If AS wasn't fairly reliable, I'd think we would be seeing a lot more comments about missed snipes. (just a thought)

Before I continue, let me just say that I just had my first successful snipe just now, and I'm looking forward to a second one. If both are OK, I plan on signing up with AS.

So please don't take any of this as just trying to smack AS around a bit. I like what they've done, and they seem pretty responsive to issues. However, everybody's got an opinion, and I'm no different


In any case.... even *86,400* per day is one a second, which is easy for any halfway decent machine with a halfway decent network connection (I've programmed that sort of thing from my three-year old laptop).

What's more important is the peak busy period. Are all those thousands bunching up in groups? That would make the effective snipes per day much higher. We don't know, but AS does, or they should.

In any case, with so *few* snipes per day, I'd have to say something's going on. In any case, if *I* worked at AS, I'd be tearing out the circuit boards and going through logs to find out what happened

Especially if they're running a Windows O/S... Then I'd probably reboot each server just before the busy period!

So anyway, if we give AS the benifit of the doubt, then Sunday something unusual happened on eBay, something that AS hasn't yet compensated for. One hopes that AS will study the issue and attempt to engineer an even better algorithm. It's through our failures that we learn!

After my first day as an AS user I set ALL my snipes to 15 seconds. Initially I'd used the default of 5 seconds, then upped it to 8 seconds, but was just not comfortable with the narrow margin I was seeing. This was because I got a bit paranoid after reading about the default of 5 seconds possibly not being enuf at certain times of the day and week. I have done a few 8 second snipes, but my default is 15 seconds and so far I've not lost any auctions because of a missed snipe. However, I only had ONE set to run on Sunday and count myself fortunate for having won that one. On occasion I've adjusted the 15 seconds up, but rarely down.

AS does add time to your lead time. I've been keeping track of my snipes and how many seconds they were placed before closing. On an average my 15 second snipes come in at about 18 seconds before auction close. This average is based on 12 snipes all set to run at 15 seconds. Most came in between 17 and 19 seconds, the highest one at 20, the lowest one at 13. The one that ran on Sunday the 21st at 20:04:42 PDT came in at 17 seconds. I consider myself VERY fortunate to have won that auction, because I doubt 15 seconds was sufficient for most of that afternoon/night.

So, you can see that AS does add time to your lead time. But for most people AS's lead time wasn't enough of a buffer to manage what was happening on eBay on Sunday. And yes, I noticed AS was having response-time problems on Sunday too... but that was only this site, not their servers that run the snipes (separate entities).

I believe Sara (AS staff) indicated Sunday the 21st was the busiest eBay day of the entire year. And again, based on what I was experiencing on Sunday, I have to agree. When you try to email a seller to ask a question about their listing by clicking on the "Ask Seller a Question" link and you get an eBay error that tells you to check out the System Administration announcements, you know something is up! I'd have to hit the back button and try sending again... and sometimes again. There was a period of time where I couldn't log into eBay on a 2nd browser, even tho I was successfully logged in on another. There were many many clues that eBay was choking on Sunday for several hours... but it would not likely have been evident on standard browsing.

And yesterday I logged in and behold! a new combined shipping function! I think they had techs working a little overtime on Sunday!

Anyway, I think it might be wise to set our snipes a little higher now that the "busy" time is upon us. I agree 45 seconds is too high... 30 seconds may also be too high... but 20-25 is probably reasonable. I'm certainly not going to lower mine below 15... 15 has served me very well so far... and if an auction is an absolute must-have, then I'll up it to at least 20. I keep reminding myself that it's not those last few seconds that count so much as it is that my bid is my absolute max. If someone snipes me in the last 5-15 seconds... then my bid wasn't high enuf.

And here's an odd and likely off-the-wall thought... I wonder if anyone subscribes to an additional sniper program? I wonder if for those people where winning auctions can make or break their business if it would help for them to have two companies sending snipes for them? One sending a snipe within a very "safe" lead time like say 60 seconds... and the other set for 10, for example. Since you can't outbid yourself at least you'd have a safety net. I don't know... maybe that's a crazy idea. Maybe AS could offer an option of double-snipes where we could set the time for the first safety-net snipe and then set the time for the final snipe... again... maybe I've not been getting enuf sleep!? Crazy woman talking here??

Anyway, I really feel for those people that lost chances at auctions on Sunday. Lately I've not had many "I've just GOT to have this" auctions I'm bidding on. I've set a max and either won them or not. But if I had a business that relied on winning certain auctions, then I know I'd want some way to avoid big losses. There must be some way of setting up a backup plan that doesn't resort to personally baby-sitting auctions and sniping manually in panic because we aren't sure our snipe is going to make it.

Thanks, as always, for listening to my meanderings. I hope there is something useful for someone in what I said.

Good luck everyone!

diva (aka Dag)

You know, I was just getting ready to list an auction that will end during a busy time. Am I not at an advantage to make sure it ends some other time but on the hour, half, or quarter? This way, if there are any snipes lurking, there will be time for them to hit!

rsmiller40