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cheeky2
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 Posted: Wed Oct 28, 2026 12:31 pm Post subject: Just lost an auction on ebay was server down?? |
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Just lost an auction on ebay when the item went for ?GBP 16.54 I placed a bid of ?GBP 17.55 on gixen yet it never placed the bid on my behalf and states 'BID UNDER ASKING PRICE' !! How can that be when the next increment is ?GBP 17.54?? What am I missing as makes no sense to me.
Ebay item is 336855378478 |
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Cupid
Joined: 09 Aug 2007
Posts: 8330
Location: Bristol, UK
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| Posted: Wed Oct 28, 2026 12:58 pm Post subject: |
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OK, this is due to the 'buyer protection' that Ebay now forces buyers to pay when buying from 'private' sellers.
The 'bid' value at the end of the auction was actually GBP 15.36, however the auction price was, as you say, GBP 16.54 (incl. GBP 1.18 Buyer Protection fee). The next bid increment is GBP 16.36, but you also have to cover the buyer protection fee which is more than GBP 1.18 at the higher price, so the bid value must be more than the GBP 17.55 that you specified as your maximum.
There's a few ways of thinking about this from a buyers point of view, you can consider that Ebay takes a bit of the extra you are trying to bid and therefore you have to make up for that by bidding higher... or you can regard the cumulative effect of buyer protection to be that Ebay have extended the bid increments a bit.
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cheeky2
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| Posted: Thu Oct 29, 2026 12:41 am Post subject: |
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| Then the ?GBP 1 increment that ebay state is bullshi* for items between ?GBP 15-?GBP 59.99 ? |
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Cupid
Joined: 09 Aug 2007
Posts: 8330
Location: Bristol, UK
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| Posted: Thu Oct 29, 2026 3:27 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: | cheeky2 wrote:
bullshi* |
It's a bit more complicated than that, as per the second paragraph of my first response.
The bid increment is still accurate with respect to the underlying bid, which is what they pay the 'private' seller.
However there's now the additional requirement, for 'private' sellers only, that you, the buyer, pay the 'buyer protection' fee as part of your bid. As detailed here
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The Buyer Protection fee is calculated as:
A flat fee of GBP 0.10 per item, and
7% of the item price up to GBP 20, and
4% of any portion of the item price from GBP 20 to GBP 300, and
2% of any portion of the item price from GBP 300 to GBP 4000
There?s also a cap on the total fee amount that the buyer will pay. Any portion of the item price over GBP 4,000 won?t incur any additional fees. When your buyer purchases multiple identical items in the same order, they only pay the flat fee once.
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So in the up to GBP 20 price range for every GBP 1 extra that you bid you have to pay Ebay an extra 7p.
That does mean they won't accept a bid of GBP 1.01 above the current price for these auctions, they will accept a bid of GBP 1.08 above the current price.
This is why I used the word 'effect', and not 'change'.
The way that Ebay chose to implement this was to reduce the bid that you actually place by the amount they are charging you and apply that as the bid. The figure that they calculate to use as a bid, and put on the bids page, is not one that anybody actually typed in as the amount that they were willing to pay when they placed a bid via the ebay.co.uk site.
The formulas are:
Seller_Price = Buyer_Price - Buyer_Protection
Buyer_Protection = 0.10 + (Seller_Price x 7 / 100)
So rearranging:
Seller_Price = (100 x (Buyer_Price - 0.10)) / 107
So going back to this specific case, the seller bid to be applied for a GBP 17.55 buyer bid is (100 x (17.55 - 0.10)) / 107 = 16.31.
GBP 16.31 is less than GBP 16.36 which is the next bid increment above the current sellers price of GBP 15.36.
Hence you get a status of 'BID UNDER ASKING PRICE' when Ebay rejects that bid.
As detailed elsewhere on this forum the operation is different if you place the bid though an alternative site like ebay.com.
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Last edited by Cupid on Thu Oct 29, 2026 12:28 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Gixen
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| Posted: Thu Oct 29, 2026 3:27 am Post subject: |
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cheeky2
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| Posted: Thu Oct 29, 2026 11:14 am Post subject: Just lost an auction on ebay was server down?? |
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I am not having a go at you just annoyed with ebay for there underhand method they use when stating the bid increments are ?GBP 1 which clearly they are not.
Anyway thanks for your explanation. Have a good weekend  |
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Cupid
Joined: 09 Aug 2007
Posts: 8330
Location: Bristol, UK
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| Posted: Thu Oct 29, 2026 11:58 am Post subject: Re: Just lost an auction on ebay was server down?? |
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| Quote: | cheeky2 wrote:
I am not having a go at you just annoyed with ebay for there underhand method |
Yeah that's fine, I didn't think you were.
I tend to agree that Ebay have obfuscated this and applied too much marketing jargon.
Fundamentally, it's not 'free to sell' on Ebay, they've just shifted some of the fees from the seller to the buyer and they've done so in a very complicated way only partly so as to not break consumer law.
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