auction ended early

charles2401 · Guest

Gixen reported a listing ended early but the lister said it ran the advertised duration, hence no bid from me. How is this possible. Item # is 290358177862
Regards
Charles

mario · Site Admin Joined: 03 Oct 2006 Posts: 2125

Charles, unfortunately most of the time this message then means Gixen was late (when seller ends it early you usually see "ENDED EARLY BY SELLER"). I am sorry about that, but it happens.

p1gp3n · Guest

first, i want to thank gixen as it has been very reliable for me in the past.

i got this same error "auction ended early". i'm wondering if it has anything do with daylight saving time, since we just fell back an hour this last weekend?

p1gp3n · Guest

i'm also wondering if this error could result from another bidder using gixen or another sniper for the same item? thanks!

mario · Site Admin Joined: 03 Oct 2006 Posts: 2125

None of this applies - snipes being late just happen. My latest statistics says 1 in 300 or so snipes on a single server.

m33rcat · Guest

Same happened here - I think the US changed the date it finishes Daylight Savings Time this year to 1st Nov. So for listings starting before 1st Nov and finishing afterwards the end time actually changed - looks like they finish 1 hour early - check the bidding history times. Not sure if this is an eBay or Gixen issue though...

Cheers,
Bill

Cupid · Joined: 09 Aug 2007 Posts: 891 Location: Bristol, UK

Bill (m33rcat),

Usually when the time changes eBay does not alter the duration of the listings, though obviously that means that the time of day that it ends in the zone that has changed is different by the amount of the change. As a result of this usually Gixen is not affected (though I know it was some years ago).

Can you give more details of any failures that you have had so that it can be investigated further to definitively determine what the reason was.
_________________
Mark

m33rcat · Guest

Hi,

I was bidding on item # 280416994552. The status is AUCTION ENDED EARLY and my high bid was $82. I was wrong about the time in my last post - the start time was in PDT and the end time was in PST (why?!) so it looked as if the listing finished an hour early when in fact it did not (see below). However it did not end early so is this likely a case of a failed snipe?

o***i( 7 ) US $76.00 Nov-06-09 09:30:06 PST
u***e( 109) US $75.00 Nov-06-09 09:29:22 PST
r***g( 668) US $66.76 Nov-06-09 09:26:35 PST
r***g( 668) US $56.76 Nov-06-09 09:25:21 PST
h***h( 415) US $41.05 Nov-05-09 09:29:38 PST
h***h( 415) US $25.00 Nov-04-09 21:55:37 PST
l***8( 313) US $22.88 Nov-04-09 21:09:42 PST
h***h( 415) US $19.99 Nov-04-09 10:06:40 PST
Starting Price US $19.99 Oct-30-09 10:30:19 PDT

Cheers,
Bill

mario · Site Admin Joined: 03 Oct 2006 Posts: 2125

Bill "AUCTION ENDED EARLY" can also mean the snipe was late. Incidence of this is 1 in every 300 cases or so.

I will see that I add some code to distinguish this case from when auction really ends early.

cs-wood · Guest

I also missed even though my bid was considerably higher than the purchaser's with the note 'Auction Ended Early'. Does this happen often because if so, I would probably have bought this particular item using ebay only?

mario · Site Admin Joined: 03 Oct 2006 Posts: 2125

Cupid · Joined: 09 Aug 2007 Posts: 891 Location: Bristol, UK

Is there any correlation between the offset and the incidence of the bid being late?

Might this be a case for increasing the default offset, perhaps to 8 seconds?

I have that as my default anyway, and have not experienced a late bid ... I do have quite a few snipes per day, with an incidence of 1 in 300 I would have expected to have a few by now.

If the default were increased, I would perhaps increase my offset even further.
_________________
Mark

mario · Site Admin Joined: 03 Oct 2006 Posts: 2125

Mark, I don't think that would help in most cases - it looks like when this final bid request hangs (and it's still rare), it takes a while, sometimes a full minute to get response... My guess is that it's ebay's servers taking longer to respond, but I have yet to investigate this.

Cupid · Joined: 09 Aug 2007 Posts: 891 Location: Bristol, UK

OK,

Yes thinking about it further, when I get a lack of response from eBay from my home computer it is usually quite a significant one, generally what I'm doing is not time significant though, so its more frustrating than annoying.

Also I dont tend to group snipes, so in order for one of mine to fail both Gixen servers would have to hit an eBay roadblock at exactly the same time... I'm guessing the likelihood of that is going to be around 1 in 90000, so I probably do have to wait a while before it affects me in terms of actually missing out... It is possible that I have just not noticed the 1 in 300 case if the other server did the job for me.
_________________
Mark