Last Minute Bidding Not Displayed On Ebay App

Hello,

just had an interesting and bad experience at ebay: Wanted to buy some stamps and set my maximum money, then looked at the ebay app the last seconds to see if I have to increase, then the time went over until 0 seconds, even the color above changed from green (me the winner) to grey (ended). So I was sure to have got it, nothing else was displayed in the ebay app (android tablet). But now I wanted to pay and saw that I was not the winner, but another person who made the bidding 3 seconds before ending.

Has anyone seen this before? Bad performance of the app, I would say. I can understand that this thing of seconds is impossible to make equal all over the world, but at least the "auction has ended" shouldn't happen without having displayed the other winner.

The app runs the same way every time it runs, the code doesn't change. But what does change is your wireless connection. I would bet that your Android lost signal for a few seconds just before the auction ended.
Don

Sure, I will do important auctions just not wireless anymore. But logically after the disconnection there has to be some data coming back to say that the auction ended. Does not seem to be the way, but the app (offline) decides itself without real data that the auction ended. Not perfect. As said my point is not about the exact seconds or the exact information about who is the winner, but the wrong information by the app that the auction has ended without giving the correct information about the bidding.

Without seeing the code it is hard to say. In any situation you still would have lost the opportunity to bid. Displaying a notification screen might be better but trying to deal with monitoring hundreds of thousands of connections for any that might drop out of a few seconds is not feasible. If it was, ebay would absolutely be supporting anything that increases bidding (and their bottom line).
Don

Sure, but anything caused the app to say "auction has ended" :). Either it makes itself those things without reaching out for the server, or the app "allows" the process to lose information and after that still accept the state "ended". Both could be a bug.

Sorry, just had to let all this out as I felt lucky about a good buy and not it's not...

I do not know, but lately, ebay for android s is very bad.Something changed, can't even download anymore. On my tablet , no problem, but on my android, forget about.They probably did a deal with Apple.

Yes, I agree it's bad performance on ebay's part, but probably really nothing we can do about the actual situation.

What I think happened was that somebody used the ebay bidder service to automatically beat any bid made. It executes in zero seconds, I'm told. So if you had rebid with less than 1 second left or even theoretically at zero seconds, that bidder would have beat you anyway. And the system can wrongly report you as winner -- I have now seen this myself.

It seems dangerous to bid this way if the competition is crazy to win. I wonder what happens when two bidders are doing this at the same time. It also encourages shill/fake bidding by the seller.