Missed Snipe, No Other Bidders

Hmm, well, I'm sorry to hear you didn't get your item.

Placing a bid uses system resources on the eBay servers. It also uses resources on the AS servers. Both use the Internet to communicate with the outside world. If there's a heavy load on either system, or heavy network traffic between AS and eBay, one of the systems may respond slowly, and the transaction might take longer than 5 seconds. The most likely problem would have been slow response from eBay.

To help prevent this, you can raise the snipe time to something greater than 5 seconds. You increase your risk of having someone else snipe it after you, but it's more likely that the bid will be placed correctly under adverse conditions. I usually bump it up a few seconds if the auction is ending during high utilization times (lunchtime or late afternoon).

You might also want to lie not quite so low. If there are no bids on an item I want, I go ahead and make the initial bid on eBay. That way, if all else fails, at least I've got a bid in. That also means I have to pay the snipe fee if that bid wins, but hey, I would have anyways.

Brian, I agree with you in general; you wrote an excellent response. Personally, I use a snipe interval of 8 seconds which also "increases your risk of having someone else snipe it after you, but it's more likely that the bid will be placed correctly under adverse conditions" but to a lesser degree.

What I wanted to point out is that it's not necessary to have the final bid in an auction -- only the winning one. If I bid $20 for a ten-dollar widget with 8 seconds left and another sniper bids $15 with 5 seconds left I'm still going to win the auction. Why would I care if somebody else got in the last bid? In sniping, the max bid is always more important than the bid timing, which is only meant to prevent a "bidding war".

Whenever your PC or the AS servers communicate with other machines over a network (ie. eBay Servers) it does so in the form of a stream (a series) of data packets usually routed using the TCP/IP protocols. The TCP transport protocol is connection-oriented and tracks the delivery of each data packet. It is also slightly slower (just like registered mail often takes longer to go through the mail system) than connection-less protocols. Each packet also contains a TTL (time to live) which is set to kill the packet after so many hops. Often in a busy network these datapackets can become stalled inside a router that advances the TTL and the data packet expires and must be resent from the source. The result... extra slow connectivity.

Bottom line is... plan ahead for such events by allowing more time for the AS server to contact the eBay server. Also, make sure you set your AS snipe up early enough that the AS server has the time to register your request and schedule the snipe event.