Ebay Fault?? Bidding against myself allowed!!!

jaxxy00

In case the title sounds a bit confusing i will explain myself. I was watching an item that already had a bid on it for 99p and placed a bid for £2.21 and was winning the item at £1.19 (unsure of exact amount). Anyway i looked earlier and noticed my bid had gone up to £2.21, due to someone else bidding (who obviously had gone to £2.20 which is why my max bid of £2.21 came in). As i really would like the item and it still has almost a day to go i placed another bid of £2.87 so that in the event of someone else bidding i hopefully will not get outbid. Now i have been doing Ebay for about 5 years now and what should have happened when i placed my further bid is that it should just have raised my proxy bid and shown an extra bid had been placed. Instead it has increased the current bid up to £2.22, in effect, allowing me to bid against myself. Now im not for one minute going to nag about the 1p extra but im just curious as to why this has happened.

bokkie7975

Could be the other bidder placed a bid of £2.21 but as you had already placed the proxy bid of £2.21 ( your max bid) first you were shown as the winning bidder....? your increased bid would then be able to outbid the other person by the 1p.
does that make sense? it did before I started typing.... :think:

quoia

Could it be that the other bidder actually bid £2.21 and not £2.20 ?

This would still put your bid up to £2.21 (since that was its maximum) and you would still be winning the auction because your bid was first.

Maybe in this situation if you then make a higher bid than your own "winning" bid, it increases by just a penny in order to "beat" the other bid of the same "equal" amount.

quoia

SNAP !

Should have concentrated more on typing my response than watching the snooker !

jaxxy00

Thanks bokki7975. Yes that does make sense, but i still think that i should have remained the winning bidder with my bid of £2.21 even if the other bidder did do a bid of £2.21. I just wouldnt have thought it would allow me to outbid myself. Unless like you say its because it was allowing me to outbid their max bid.

loracan1

I've had something similar happen, bidding on an item I'd put in maximum bid of 6.22, checked back later and I was winning the item at that price. I had to go out so thought I'd put in another maximum bid 8.22. The button's there - asking if you want to put in another maximum bid. It then refreshed at 6.50, even though I was only bidding against myself. Item went for a lot more anyway as it happened but still annoying.

Teerah

yep think its happened to me a couple of times too

jaxxy00

Well im pleased its not just me its happened to then. It seems to me that there probably is something wrong with the way the bids are placed if this has been happening to others especially with what loracan1 said about the bid jumping up from £6.22 to £6.50. If it went to the next penny as it did in my case, fair enough, but not up by 28p, thats out of order. I would email ebay and ask them myself but im not even going to attempt to do that. Ive had to try and contact them before and there doesnt seem to be an end to the menu system on having questions answered by the faq section (if you now what i mean).

divadee

this has happened to me as well. I was the only one bidding on the item i had put my bid in but had to go out. it had had no other bids at all, but i decided to up it a bit to make sure i won it and it immediately went up. it said it had 2 bids on it (both mine) and it went up by 20p!! did annoy me a lot at the time

RACHIE77

This has happened to me quite a lot before to be honest and is one of the reason that proxy bidding sometimes annoys me - one minute its a really useful tool and the next minute its really more of a pain than a help! Imagine if ebay 'accidentally' added the odd 5p or 10p on to every one of its sales for a couple of days, thats got to give them some extra revenue when it comes to fees?? Has anyone asked what ebay have to say about it or seen what it says on the ebay forums??

quoia

Don't forget that on a reserve price auction where the reserve has not been reached, the price will increase if you put in a higher bid than your current one if the new bid meets or exceeds the reserve.