No snipe placed....

I had a similar situation come up a couple of days ago. I filed a problem report and here is the response I got. The response is easily understandable but it would help if AS posted the info for "did not win" under general information so we would not have to ask around for the explenation.

Here was the responose, best of luck to you:

Almost all Did Not Win and Not In Time messages are due to lead time. The default 5 second lead time, while adequate for most weekday situations, just isn‘t enough for evenings and weekends. And anything under 5 seconds is strongly not recommended.

We snipe from an atomic clock which calibrates our servers. We snipe every auction at least 3 times ---from 3 different servers and locations. 2 snipe exactly on time, and one server tries to adjust for eBay server lag according to how long their average server is taking.
Remember that it‘s in our interests for you to win: if you don‘t win, we don‘t get paid---so we do our best to see that you do indeed win!

You should increase your lead time to 7-12 seconds on auctions that close 5-11 p.m. PST, and on weekends, when eBay traffic is heavier.
There are risks to sniping. No service or software guarantees your wins. Here‘s the link to our page on this:

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

I suppose what you say is possible, it's just odd because the status said "Did Not Win". It didn't say "Not in time" or something like that, which leads me to believe that AS didn't even attempt to snipe it. In fact, as far as I can tell AS didn't try to make the bid... the auction ended with no bids.

It's no big deal with this particular item, but I'd hate to lose something I really want or need because of this. I guess from here out I'll have to change my lead to 7 seconds on weekends in case that was the issue here, but if that was the case I would think the status would state "Not in time".

My understanding of what a 'did not win' is.

Your bid was placed. eBay either did not answer, or answered with a status message not recognized. Checking your snipes at this time would have shown a 'status unknown' message. Later, (not sure if it's minutes or hours) AS follow up showed you did indeed lose the auction, but because of the original 'unknown status' they are not sure exactly why you lost. At this time your 'unknown status' is changed to 'did not win'.

In the above example, since no bids were placed on the auction, it's likely eBay should have answered with 'Not In Time', but could have been some problem with sign in etc...