Esnipe failed to place bid, or

or else eBay rejected the esnipe bids on several items.

I'm looking into what went wrong here.

Anyone else had issues with esniping?

 

On very rare occasions, I've had what appeared to be some sort of issue with esnipe that prevented a bid from being placed. It's only happened maybe a couple of times over the course of hundreds of bids, and it's been a very long time since it last occurred. The service is usually very reliable. Last time I used it was on Monday, and a bid I'd scheduled went through with no problems.

 

It can happen. Haven't you ever had momentary Internet issues or interruptions, where it might take a minute or so to check your mail or bring up a web page? Esnipe and eBay (the problem could have been on either end) are not immune to them.

 

There was a similar issue awhile back with the Auction Sniper service. What was happening there was that ebay was putting up captcha type security questions when Auction Sniper would try and place a bid. They rectified the problem shortly.

@quicksrt Any news from esnipe as to what happened?

 

Captcha issues is one possibility.

Another possibility is cover bidding. In cover bidding, someone places a very large bid to "cover" a much lower bid. At the last minute, the cover bid is retracted and the lower bid (placed in cahoots) wins.

Check the bidding history for the items in question to see if there were any last minute bid retractions.

 

I'm lost as to how this is supposed to work. Bid retractions in the last 12 hours of listings are only allowed if you made the original bid within the hour. You can't have your buddy place the "winning" $10 bid and put in a $1000 bid from another account that you intend to retract to cover it. The bid will then show as $10.50 and anyone else who wants to bid can do so, pushing up the bid below as they go. When you retract, they will be the underbidder and win. Even if you try to pull all of this off in the last hour, it takes at least a minute to work through the eBay retraction process (giving reasons, etc.) and that will leave the sale vulnerable to 4 second snipes. You could never time the retraction that closely.

 

What does eSnipe have in the "status" column on the items? Anything noted in the eSnipe messages?