[Cupid]

Yes you can only change the offsets of your bids if you have a Mirror subscription.

However that is not the primary selling point for me, it's that the reliability is increased by having two servers independently placing the bid for you, which is why its called a Mirror subscription and not a Variable Offset subscription :-).

[Krustyklimber]

Mark,

Thanks for the clarification, it helps.

I'll try to learn from this "failure" and have already upped some of the next few auctions I'm looking at by 50 cents (given that I don't want to be outbid by a penny or two).

If I understand correctly I cannot change the bid offset timing... unless I upgrade to Mirror... which I'll definitely have to consider, deeply, if I don't end up winning one of the two auctions that end this afternoon.

[Cupid]

Yes, sometimes it's not the last bid that wins, in fact it doesn't even have to be higher than the next highest (in this case yours)... sometimes it's the earliest.

It can be worse than this, if your bid ends up within one bid increment of the current price, at the time it's due to be placed, then it gets rejected entirely by Ebay, so sometimes even the buyer that is prepared to pay most still doesn't win.

In this case if your bid had been a penny more it would have outbid the other buyers earlier bid though, which is why adding the odd penny here or there can be an equally successful strategy, and certainly one I'd recommend more than that of choosing an offset less than the default of 6 seconds.

To directly answer your subsequent question... you would only have needed to be prepared to pay one penny more, the other bid was the amount that they submitted as their bid. You can tell this because had it been more than that Ebay would have made them pay up to one bid increment more from their bid than they are now being asked to pay for this item. It isn't possible that the earlier bid could have any knowledge of your later one (unless you told them about it and why would you do that ?), it must be just coincidence that it was the same as you had decided to bid, Ebay didn't even receive that bid of yours till 7 seconds after they had placed theirs.

There is an advantage you could have gained via use of your Mirror subscription but that would have entailed setting the offset on at least one of the servers to be greater than 12 seconds (up to 15 is possible), so that your bid was placed before the one that beat you, but not many set their offsets to be quite that long.

I do recommend that people have that Mirror subscription but that is for other reasons than would have helped you in this case, notwithstanding what I just said about this case I wouldn't actually recommend always having an offset as high as 15 seconds, it has its uses, but not necessarily for winning auctions like this one.

[Krustyklimber]

Never mind..... I figured it out.

I was beat to the punch, by 7 seconds. :(

Which leads me to new questions; had I been willing to go higher, would the winning bidders sniper have beaten me to each successive bid, by the same 7 seconds *until we ran out of time?

Is this a case of a Gixen Mirror account showing its advantages?

[Krustyklimber]

Item 174233981834
I had my high bid set at $155 and was the auction ended at $155, but I'm not the buyer... how does this work?