Missed item due to AUCTION ENDED EARLY OR SNIPE LATE

g0akc · Guest

Missed an auction due to this error;

AUCTION ENDED EARLY OR SNIPE LATE

eBay item number:152102115128

I had a bid amount in excess of the final auction price. No sign of the seller ending it early.

very disappointed.

What gives?

Cupid · Joined: 09 Aug 2007 Posts: 8004 Location: Bristol, UK

Was this snipe Mirrored?...

If so, what was the status on the Mirror tab?
_________________
Mark

mario · Site Admin Joined: 03 Oct 2006 Posts: 7281

Unfortunately this was indeed a timeout. As of recently timeouts are more frequent, even though failures are still well under 1% of total snipes.

VMan · Guest

I've experienced much the same thing bidding on eBay item 391465835885.

My snipe bid was well above the winning bid, but the "AUCTION ENDED EARLY BY SELLER".

The auction was actually completed on eBay, and it seems more likely that the bid was submitted late.

The offset was the default 6 sec and the bid was mirrored.

This was my first auction on Gixen after switching from another sniping site, so it was not an encouraging experience.

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Cupid · Joined: 09 Aug 2007 Posts: 8004 Location: Bristol, UK

VMan,

That one really was ended early... at the top of the listing is the text:

'This listing was ended by the seller because the item was sold.'

Ebay only inserts that if the seller took the action it describes.
_________________
Mark

VMan · Guest

Thanks for that, you're right.
I looked at the page, but must've had one of my patented "man looks" and didn't see that message at all.
Sorry to impugn Gixen, and thanks for the rapid investigation!

sjpilkington · Guest

Item number 222126058215 and the winning bid is 12GBP lower than my max bid placed through Gixen except .... that bid was never placed. The message I see is "auction ended early or snipe late".

Hopefully support can give a very full explanation of what went wrong because, while Gixen may claim to have a low failure rate, from my point of view the failure rate is 100%.

mario · Site Admin Joined: 03 Oct 2006 Posts: 7281

Today the failure rate was 5 times normal. You were still unlucky, but approximately 3% of snipes from a single server failed, which by far exceeds the normal.

There was nothing on Gixen servers that caused this - simply connections to eBay were timing out. All this started happening on occasion weeks ago, and I don't fully understand why. From my perspective it looks like eBay suddenly started running out of its capacity, even though this seems unlikely knowing that eBay is long past its growth phase, and it's not a holiday season either.