Prices not refreshing on some items

[pbk101]

example: 358583513571
shows as 139.50 USD (18 bids) on my snipes page.
is actually already at US $236.38 (25 bids)

Tries to refresh prices from 2 different devices. same result.

No error shown.

[Cupid]

It's not an error.

Besides placing late bids which is obviously the most critical feature of a sniping service retrieving prices of auctions is the most resource intensive feature of this site.

Many years ago it was attempted to do this is real time, let's just say it didn't work out well.

Subsequently, it was redesigned to perform the refresh of prices periodically and systematically in the background.

Since then there's been some rollback with features such as more frequent updates and 'Refresh' buttons.. but, to be honest, without a considerable increase in costs for users it's never going to be practical to provide a real time service for this, and even an on demand one has to be throttled because the demand can become too high if people keep repeatedly pushing those buttons.

Choosing a snipe value you are comfortable with does take a bit of research and up to date prices on auctions that you're interested in can be a factor in that, however it shouldn't be the be all and end all... otherwise focusing just on that can actually result in paying too much for a specific item.
_________________
Mark

[Haytil]

I would suggest that maybe the snipes page should have some explicit indicator that \"Current Bid\" values may not be immediately up-to-date.

I noticed the same issue that OP did, and became concerned that if this was not working, then perhaps the actual critical service of the sniping wouldn't be working either.

Without such an indicator, it may be incorrectly signaling to users that something is broken (as \"Current Bid\" is obviously not necessarily the Current Bid...).

[Cupid]

I think, if I were designing this now, I might consider saving the last update time of the price, for every snipe. Then against that price, in the user interface, I might display how long ago that was.

At this stage that's a major redesign though, so I don't know how many months of work that might be to implement, from where we are now.
_________________
Mark

[Gixen]