Last-second bids. For how much longer?
I'm sure this has happened to all of us on many occasions. We bid on an item and a couple of seconds before it ends someone shows up who outbids us without letting us increase our bid, losing the chance to buy the product by paying a bit more. This practice, which I dislike so much, has no place in any auction that claims to be serious. How do they solve it on other online platforms or at live auctions? Simply, they extend it by one or two more minutes if someone tries to use the aforementioned trickery. In this way, it stops being worthwhile for that kind of person to waste time systematically and bid in advance. How much longer will eBay keep allowing this kind of pirate behavior? Adopting the measures mentioned does not harm the seller, the buyer, or the platform. Please change the last-second bidding methodology.
miordo0
·2 years agoThis is done like this, because otherwise it would be an auction that would never end and would give sellers a chance to inflate their own auctions even more with clone accounts.
To take an item, you have to do the following. When there’s little time left, enter the maximum you’re willing to pay. Even if someone else bids in the last 10 seconds, if the final highest price is yours, you get it.
For a lot of things, I use a sniper. A program that bids for you. Especially when auctions end at times when I’m sleeping or not at home. I set a maximum price and the program bids for you in the last few seconds. But if the price is lower than what others have bid, you don’t win the item either, as I said at the beginning.
I’ll give an example of what not to do. An item that has an average second-hand price of €100. It’s up for auction at €50. You bid €55. It goes up to auction at €52 and you’re the highest bidder. But in the last 5 minutes, new interested buyers appear and one bids €70, another €80, and another €100. The auction ends at €92, because no one has come along to bid more than €100.
Summary. The best thing is that when there’s little time left, you put in the maximum you’re willing to pay. If you get it, great. If not, then wait for another similar one.
julio_panda
·1 year agoWhat the user says in their reply is correct, as long as eBay follows the rules of the game that they themselves set, and we all play by the same ones.
What has happened to me is that in an auction whose end time was 17:16 (Spain time), I was in the lead and watching it online, as well as having an automatic bid set, and after the auction time ended I received a notification that I had lost because someone had placed a bid one euro higher at the end.
When I go in to see the bid history, I notice that the winning bid time is 17:16:20, that is, 20 seconds after the end time, which is obviously illegal because that is the time the entry is recorded and it is out of time (and it was a new bid, not an automatic bid, since those are recorded with the time when the automatic bid was placed). I have complained to the seller, and they have not replied, and eBay customer support tell me it is correct because of time zones, which has absolutely nothing to do with it.
The issue is that, regardless of time zones, each system's time base, etc., the only time base that counts is eBay's auction system, and in it it is clearly shown that the winning bid is later.
If eBay, in announcing an auction's end time, states the day, hour, and minute (it does not show seconds), legally it is understood to end at the exact minute.
With almost complete certainty, if I took this to court they would rule in my favor (the simple screenshot I attach is more than enough to prove it).
Definitely, the system seems like fraud to me, and there is surely some trick out there to get the system to accept it. For that reason, for normal users like us, who buy on eBay from time to time when we need something, it is not advisable to take part in a fraudulent auction system like this one when it comes to some product that is of interest.
frankb1290
·1 year agoI’d never noticed before, but it’s true: even though the final moment to place a bid is indicated in minutes, 17:16 in your case, Ebay’s servers accept bids until 59 seconds later, that is, in your case up to 17:16:59 inclusive. It’s true that indicating only the minutes is an imprecise, ambiguous, debatable, and if you like, counterintuitive practice, but it doesn’t seem fraudulent to me. There’s no intention to deceive on Ebay’s part (what benefit could Ebay get from that?) nor does the ambiguity lead to anything serious. Or does it?