what did i do wrong?

Unless someone comes up with a better idea, I’d suggest you file a support request:
http://support.auctionsniper.com/

quote:

the 8 of the 10 auctions that either said "Unable to Sign in" or "Did Not Win" all ended below my minimum bid.

Note that even though the auctions closed below your proposed snipe of $20.07, the winning bidder may have had a proxy bid higher than that. Just a thought of consolation and not related to the snipes not being placed.

while thats entirely possible, the OTHER thing i like about sniping is that it at least makes the mean old person who outbid me pay as much as i would have =) I'll file a request today - thanks for the help. Oh, for what its worth, one of the 'unable to sign in's changed to 'did not win' today - don't know why. ash well, thanks again

I got the following response as a result of my inquiry. i suggested they clear up the help pages - the impression i got from the hlp was that 30 seconds would make it work, and less would just cause you to 'skip' an auction. it appears that instead, it will cause a cascading 'unable to sign in' kind of problem. I'll try it again in the future, and will report back then

On the majority of these snipes, there really isn‘t 30 seconds between them. More like 15-20 on many of them. But even 30 seconds isn‘t enough, and I recommend closer to a minute. Obviously, more is better.

This series is a real good reason for that recommendation too: if you click on the confirmation button to those Did Not Wins, and even some of the Unable to sign in messages, what you actually find is an eBay response saying Not In Time. This is because eBay was timing out on our repeated logins for your bid group snipes. That you even got the Auction Over response from eBay means we did finally log in (on one of our backup snipe servers), but by then either the snipe was too late or eBay was taking too long to process them. In view of the time-outs, I‘d say eBay.

The only way I could see to avoid the kind of cascade failure you had, especially since you wanted 2-3 wins, would be to create 2 or 3 bid groups, with one specified win each, and make the snipes as far as possible in time from each other. That way, your bid groups snipes have the best chance of getting the wins you wanted.

michael
senior technical support
http://www.auctionsniper.com

Regarding a proxy bid. Even if the previous bidder has a proxy, your Sniped Bid would automatically take the bid up to the next increment above your sniped bid. The end of auction bid would then be higher than your 20.07 (if the snipe actually had have worked)