Snipe Did Not Happen, no explaination in sniper email

I am in the same situation.
My snipe was not placed.
Aug-21-03 12:03:11 PDT

C

I had the same thing happen to me.

Said my snipe was "Ready" but didn't happen.

Status Summary: Ready
Your snipe could not be placed because of the reason above
Click here to see eBay's response to your snipe

Suggestion: You might want to consider using Auction Sniper Bid Groups. With Bid Groups, you can bid on the same item from multiple sellers -- your bids will automatically be placed on each successive auction until you win one. This can help you avoid the disappointment of losing on an item you really want!

Folks tend to forget that it's only a computer with a limited number of messages to choose from that is trying to explain why your bid didn't get placed. From the wording you describe, it would appear that your lead time was insufficient and therefore eBay didn't get to your bids before the auctions closed. Since eBay won't accept a bid after the auction closes, AS sees your bid as still "Ready" even though the auction is over.

In some cases the cause might have been an eBay power outage last night. The eBay Systems Announcement board reads, in part, "This evening, eBay experienced a power outage at our primary hosting facility. Due to this power failure, all site functions, including the Announcement Board, were unavailable from 20:55 until 23:45. eBay worked with its hosting vendor to restore the site as quickly as possible."

Since those times are Pacific Daylight Time, you might want to "translate" them into your time zone to see whether that was the cause of your bid failure.

Steve I respect your post's point of view.

In my case today, the snipe I had placed (well in advance) was expected to be executed with 20 seconds lead time.
I was surprised when I saw the winning bid was lower than mine, and it was placed before my expected snipe would have been placed. My snipe would have won.

The time of day was roughly 12 noon PST today. not last night, so that doesn't match with the timing of ebay's stated difficulties.

In this case I had backed off my standard lead time to allow for slow processing or bandwidth issues on purpose! My assumption is that a 20 sec lead time is plenty for software response these days, and for ebay processing.

If response was typically slow one would expect to lose a lot of auctions with 5 sec snipe time chosen.That has NOT been the case for me in perhaps 25 bid snipes, excepting today.

That leads me to believe the problem was with Auction Sniper and their bid placement.
Maybe Auction Sniper had a problem.

Is this the place to be told by the company or to find out from others there has been a problem? I may be wrong, but with this forum it seems we'd learn of things when there is ANY issue.
That's why I even took the time to bring my issue to attention. Is this forum the right place?

I'm hoping to hear a plausible explanation.
So far, I don't think one's been posted.

I do expect Auction Sniper to be reliable. I will accept that it's not 100%, 100% of the time.

I'd just like to be told if it's known why my bid failed.

C

This happened to me also. Looks like a big problem for AS to solve

Catey, I'm just a sniper like you. I wasn't trying to give you a definitive answer, only to propose possible solutions to why your snipe wasn't placed. The only folks who can do more than that are the tech support people at AS. I suggest that you file a support claim with them; go to http://support.auctionsniper.com/ and drop them a line from there.

I had the same problem, several snipes set to go, and none were placed.

Fortunately for me, in a couple of them I had placed proxy bids (kind of low), and no one else bid so I still won. (Just lucky I guess)

But the others that were won by lower bids kind of burned me. Now I don't trust AS to place my bids, I watch and "snipe" it myself (bid last minute) when I really WANT the item.

It bothers me that I don't trust AS to perform anymore, it's so much more trouble to do it yourself.

Tired and shagged out after a long squawk....

Well, I don't know if it matters...but just thought that I would share the information that I had 3 snipes set up for this afternoon/evening eastern time. All of them went off perfectly. So, either the time of the problems is more isolated than that...or something else may have caused the problem.

Hopefully things have settled down now...but it would be nice to know what all has been going on between eBay and AS over the last 24 hours.

WarriorNun

"If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning"

Perhaps this is what affected our bids???
I saw this on a news site this morning:

"EBay Blacks Out for Three Hours


Email this Story

Aug 21, 5:56 PM (ET)


SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - A power outage at a Web hosting facility caused a three-hour shutdown of the Web site of eBay, the online auction company said Thursday.

The shutdown between 8:55 p.m. and 11:45 p.m. Wednesday was eBay's first complete blackout in about two years and affected an unknown number of bids, said company spokesman Kevin Pursglove.

The online giant handles about 7 million bids a day.

A roughly 10 minute-long power outage at a Qwest Communications facility in Santa Clara, one of several computing plants eBay uses to run its Web site, triggered the blackout. It forced eBay to reboot its systems, a process that usually takes about two hours, Pursglove said.

The company plans to credit listing fees for affected sellers. Bids that were scheduled to end at the time of the blackout have already been extended 24 hours, Pursglove said.

Shares of eBay rose $2.24 to close Thursday at $112.60 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

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On the Net:

http://www.ebay.com "


The article said that the shut down happened Wednesday, but my auction that I was sniping ended on Thursday, August 21st, so I don't know if this affected anything or not...

(I do know that when I went back and checked the item on Ebay that I was sniping, that no bids had been placed at all on that particular item.)

quote:

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Originally posted by WarHawks:
Shares of eBay rose $2.24 to close Thursday at $112.60 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

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ebay has a blackout and their stock goes up.

Somehow I would imagine that the snipes that did not go through on Thursday, particularly early in the day, were related in some way to eBay's major meltdown, the first in two years.

We know that the power outage only lasted about 10 minutes. But eBay had to reboot its whole system, a procedure which at its best requires two hours or longer. Ebay says it was down from 20:55 PDT to 23:45 PDT on August 20, which is about 3 hours. Convert PDT to your own time zone to see whether the eBay outage could have caused your problem.

My auction (and snipe) were for:

Aug-21-03 12:02:47 PDT

This is approximate a half-day prior to the power outage... Maybe my snipe sensed the impending electrical failure and responded accordingly?

Now, I shall manually snipe just before the close of an auction.

Quoting neotheone, "Aug-21-03 12:02:47 PDT

This is approximate a half-day prior to the power outage... "

If the power outage occurred entirely on Aug. 20, how can anything on the 21st be prior to it? Your withering sarcasm is lost on me.

Whoops.

Okay then... half a day later..

So then the failure of your snipe was unrelated to the power outage. I suggest you file a support claim at http://support.auctionsniper.com/. If AS was at fault, at least you'll get some free snipes out of it by way of compensation.

The reason given by my AS notice was NOT IN TIME.

But this was days before the eBay meltdown, so I don't know what was going on between AS and eBay at the time.

On top of of this, my email provider had some major trouble (almost too coincidental) and I've lost ALL my email from Aug 20-21 , AND my computer's email program crashed this morning and wiped out a lot of my archived email no matter whether it was filed in it's own folder or wherever it was, whole folders (full of eBay correspondence) just disappeared.

I've had a REALLY BAD week so far.... (there should be a "crying gremlin")

Tired and shagged out after a long squawk....

"Not in time" means that AS submitted your bid, but eBay didn't accept it before time ran out in the auction. This, in turn, indicates that your lead time was insufficient. If the snipe took place on a Sunday, for example, or if the auction ended on an even hour, half-hour, or quarter-hour that could make your usual lead time too short.

Apparently, eBay and their auctionsniper are not in sync. If you change your eBay password for any reason (and you should do this regularly for security purposes), then you must also go to AuctionSniper and change your password from the old eBay one to the new eBay one, otherwise auction sniper cannot place your snipe.

It took me a few minutes to figure out how to do this, but it was worth it. Just click on Modify my Account at the top of the Auction Sniper page, and then change your password to the one you are currently using with eBay.

You don't need to be a brain surgeon to do this, just a desperate eBayer who does not want to miss out on any more snipes because of eBay's weird ways of operating



My snipe was not placed because eBay stated that my username and password were invalid.

"Either the User ID "Katriona5" is not a registered eBay user, or the Password is incorrect. Please go back and try again. Make sure you are not entering a blank space before, after, or inside the User ID or Password.
Remember your User ID but not your password? Access your Password Hint, if you have one, and create a new password.

If you are not a registered eBay user, you can proceed to our Free registration page to become a registered eBay user."

I have been an eBay member for several years,but a couple of days ago I changed my password (for security reasons, and apparently eBay and auctionsniper are not on the same page when it comes to this. I still do not know if auctionsniper will place my snipes sometime around midnight tonight, although it does say it is "Ready" to do so... which is exacly what it said about the "non-snipe" earlier this afternoon.
Does anyone have an answer to this problem? If so, I would be very grateful it you would share it with me.

[This message was edited by Katriona5 on August 24, 2003 at 01:27 PM.]

[This message was edited by Katriona5 on August 24, 2003 at 01:28 PM.]