This was posted by Sniper Sara B. (AS support) on 4/23/03 at 10:25 AM:
The problem is eBays 10 cent feature for sellers listing items that lets the schedule their start time. It causes tens of thousands of listings to all end at exactly on the hour and half hour etc. eBay becomes clogged during those times. For all intents eBay is unavailable at those times. They are flooded by buyers resfreshing their screens to either snipe or see if they won, and by sellers to see how much their items sold for and so they can email the winners etc.
Additionally, this applies to auctions that end exactly on the quarter hour (hh:15:00 and hh:45:00).
For these types of auctions, AS recommends 20 to 25 seconds.
"Dont worry about that seeming like too big of a lead time. Manual snipers wont even get the chance to bid most likley because their bid wont make it in time to eBay because of the extra load of users coming in because so many items are ending at once." - AS support.
Also, you'll notice the high bidder sniped his own high bid 33 seconds before the end of the auction. That might be an indication that response time was slow.
[This message was edited by Rick on June 12, 2003 at 01:20 PM.]
