More lead time advice

5 seconds should be OK. I'd use 8, but that just me. It's very hard for someone to place a manual counter-snipe in 8 seconds, and since there's not a lot of bids, it doesn't sound like it going to be that competitive.

McGarnicle;

These conservative leads times I think are a byproduct of what was going on during January/February on ebay. ebay was having some resource issues, and the worst occurred on Sunday nights. You could depend on seeing several complaints about snipes "not in time". So, we all started suggesting longer lead times. I think before this year, I was still using 5 seconds, without a problem. But during those couple of months, I changed to 8+ seconds. Well, since early March, everything seems OK. So, it seems that ebay made some changes to improve performance. It's been a few of months since I've seen a "not in time" (other than auctions ending exactly on the hour/half hour). Every once in a while someone complains about a snipe being placed to early.

Not trying to make up your mind for you. Just thought you'd like some of the history.

yup,all of my complaints are for way too early bids 4 sec lead = 13sec b4 auction ends.I'm now down to 2-3 sec lead.risky but Hadnt missed one yet.bids take place usually with 5-6secs to go but i have been outbid on bids that were too early.

Junky,

(I'm having a hard time keeping up with your posting the same comment in multiple places.)

How do you know that you lost because someone place a snipe in response to your snipe. Isn't it more likely they were using a service like AS?


This was posted by Sniper Sara B. (AS support) on 4/28/03 at 12:07 AM:

It means snipes immeditately before yours took eBay at least an extra 5 seconds to process because eBay was running slowly.
It's meant to keep users from losing snipes because they were late. Which would happen if we didnt do this and eBay kept running slowly.

We cant control eBays speed and they slow up and down all the time. It is most dramatic on Sunday when they are most busy. It is better to do this than to miss snipes completely.