Said auction ended early...went to term my bid not place

tradeshops · Guest

Set up a bid for of 9 pounds item number: [url=http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=170046058012]170046058012[/url]

Bid was not placed.

Gixen message:
ENDED 9.00 3.99 1 AUCTION ENDED EARLY (1)

Was there a particular problem that I did not secure this item?

mario · Site Admin Joined: 03 Oct 2006 Posts: 7240

Auction ended early means Gixen was late (unless if it really ended early by seller action).

I noticed that quite a few snipes were late in that time frame - and I am trying to determine why. Apparently there was a problem of some kind.

In the meantime, I restarted the services, and it seems OK now.

Sorry about your missed auction and thank you for notifying me.

Mario.

P.S. I deleted your other posts as it's the same issue, please respond in the same topic.

tradeshops · Guest

Thank you for getting back to me so quickly.

Both of the auctions mentioned ran their full course.

I did have another bid set up with a competitor of yours for an auction that finished in roughly the same time period. It too failed to place my bid, which was greater than the eventual winning bid. I will not mention the competitors name directly, but I do wish their programme would just snipe.

So, perhaps there is a problem eBay way? Their pages, (ebay.com, .au and .uk), have been very slow to load the past 48 hours.

Thanks once again.

Regards,
tradeshops

mario · Site Admin Joined: 03 Oct 2006 Posts: 7240

This is interesting - and it's quite possible...
Before today, incidence of Gixen being late was very, very low (1 in 500)...
If another sniping service failed as well, that might indicate ebay problems.
I might add additional code to Gixen - tracking ebay response times. That would probably shed more light on events like this one.

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CanadianWeasel · Guest

As always, with any sniping service you run the risk of missing out on the bid due to server problems or network congestion.

ebay most certainly does have periods where there is heavy load on its servers and network and it may skew bidding. I've lost auctions which I might have won except for latency from eBay, and I was live bidding. It happens and there's nothing that can be done about it. So even if you're live bidding directly with eBay, this thing may occur. It's just one of those things you kind of have to live with. Technology ain't perfect.

It's entirely possible for eBay to monitor network bandwidth and adjust auction timings accordingly, but it would be a massive undertaking and the gains would likely only be negligible.