Topic: JBidwatcher Help / JBid does not identify my winning bids

I think he’s working on a completely new version, so minor glitches in this one are unlikely to be given a high priority. But I certainly support the reminder for contributions….

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / JBid does not identify my winning bids

I’m not saying it makes JBidWatcher unusable – just less convenient than it was before. I used to be able to scroll down my ‘Complete’ page checking out what I had bought – now I can’t do that. But I’m still happy with the product… :)

More importantly, if it’s not just my system, it indicates that there is some problem with the software (or ebay has changed something). In either case it needs to be brought to Morgan’s attention. That’s why I was asking if anyone else had experienced it. It seems to have happened before…..

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / JBid does not identify my winning bids

I am now getting the ‘no check marks in the icon column’ . Also, no ‘Max Bid’ filled in in that column.

Sometimes I do get them working properly – about 1 in 10 of my bids. It’s a little odd, and a bit disconcerting – I used to use the green tick as a handy way to tell if I’d won an item – now I have to go into ebay and check if I have won it….

Any one else experiencing this issue?

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / am i logged in or not?

I hope they appreciate it…!

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / JBidWatcher not showing ticks or bid price

Thanks for the response!
Oddly, as soon as I put the bug report in, the ticks started to appear back in front of the items I had won. But the prices are still not appearing.

If no one else has the problem it must be my build – I’ll have to re-install and see if that helps…

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / JBidWatcher not showing ticks or bid price

I’ll take that as a ‘No’, then…?

Topic: General Sniping Discussion / want to start bid sniping, need some advice please.

I would tend to recommend somewhere between 10 seconds and 5 seconds. During an auction people will be manually bidding, then looking at the competition and raising their bids. As we get to the end of an auction a point will come when there is no longer enough time to look at the price and raise a bid. You want to put your bid in at the earliest possible time after that.

Ignore the other bids – make up your mind what the max price you are prepared to pay for that item is, and use JBidwatcher to put that in at the point where nobody can look at that figure and raise it. In my experience, someone who is working hard at manually refreshing the screen takes about 7-8 seconds to see themselves being outbid, go to a biding screen and type in a new bid. Most people are a lot slower than that…

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / JBidWatcher not showing ticks or bid price

I’m running 2.1.6-0-geb75036 on a WXP machine.

After the little hiatus with the times going out, my installation is making bids, and then passing the data to the ‘Complete’ section. But it is not filling in the ‘max bid’ field, and not adding a tick to the status when I have won.

Is anybody else finding this happening?

Topic: JBidwatcher Tips and Tricks / Can JBidWatcher do more than 1 snipe at once?

May 2009, to be precise…..

Topic: JBidwatcher Tips and Tricks / Can JBidWatcher do more than 1 snipe at once?

“..It might take a computer a microsecond but my Roadrunner connection will take a lot longer than that…”

Umm…that’s not an issue. That’s allowed for in the timings. And you’re not really addressing the original question, which asked if JBidWatcher could send two snipes within a short time – say, two seconds. I believe (and Morgan can correct me if I’m wrong) that JBidWatcher can send out many snipes within 1 second. I don’t think that JBidWatcherneeds to ‘wait for confirmation’ before sending out another snipe. So people can safely bid on several items (within reason!) that are ending at the same time, and do not have to adjust their timings to allow for their multiple bids.

By the way, I was the one who pointed out that issue with a lower earlier bid – over a year ago now…..

Topic: JBidwatcher Tips and Tricks / Can JBidWatcher do more than 1 snipe at once?

Yes.

It takes very little time to send off a bid. A machine-generated bid does not have to wait for a web page to come up. I suspect that Jbidwatcher can handle snipes that are microseconds apart….

Topic: JBidwatcher Tips and Tricks / How Close to Snipe

As opposed to waiting until just before the end of the war…? :)

Topic: JBidwatcher Tips and Tricks / How Close to Snipe

“…As long as you have the accepted maximum bid it does not matter when you place it, you win…”

That seems so obvious I would hesitate to state it!

But the point I was trying to make still stands. Sniping is NOT about trying to bid at the last possible second. It is about trying to bid at the EARLIEST possible moment when a return bid cannot be made. This is because your early bid will trump a later one of the same value, or a higher value, if the later one does not reach the new accepted maximum bit that you have set.

So it’s actually counter-productive to set your snipe to 2 or 3 seconds. It doesn’t win you any more, and in close bidding circumstances it might lose you the purchase, even if you have an equal or slightly higher bid….

Topic: JBidwatcher Tips and Tricks / How Close to Snipe

“..Highest bid ALWAYS win no matter snipe 1 second or 100 seconds before the end of the auction… "

NO. Your bid has to be higher than the current price by a set margin. If it is just a small bit higher it will be rejected. See the example above.

That shows an instance where the higher bidder would lose, and where, if he had made the exact same bid four seconds earlier, he would have won.

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / snipes fired around 30 to 60 minutes too late - time delta wrong???

The auctionstealer site (referenced in another thread as http://www.auctionstealer.com/systemstatus.cfm ) now includes the words:

“…UPDATE 11-07-2011 19:48 CT: It now appears that eBay has made the necessary changes to prevent this issue from happening throughout their system in all categories that our Development & QA team were able to find and test. As of early yesterday evening, missed bids due to this were almost entirely eradicated, and as of this evening, we believe you can begin adding items to your queue again without having to worry about this issue. We have added the Time Remaining data to the bid entry, however, in the hopes that will make it easier for our customers to double-check the auction end times as they are entered…”

So this suggests that the issue is now over, and it is safe to snipe again….

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Linux: "Time left" 1hr too much

The auctionstealer site (referenced above) now includes the words:

“…UPDATE 11-07-2011 19:48 CT: It now appears that eBay has made the necessary changes to prevent this issue from happening throughout their system in all categories that our Development & QA team were able to find and test. As of early yesterday evening, missed bids due to this were almost entirely eradicated, and as of this evening, we believe you can begin adding items to your queue again without having to worry about this issue. We have added the Time Remaining data to the bid entry, however, in the hopes that will make it easier for our customers to double-check the auction end times as they are entered…”

So this suggests that the issue is now over, and it is safe to snipe again….

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Linux: "Time left" 1hr too much

@stanleymack

“But the reason we snipe is to keep the prices down by not becoming involved in a bidding war, and sniping is now very common, so if I were eBay I would be wanting to sabotage sniping so as to get people back to reckless bidding. ..”

I don’t believe that we would suddenly lose our collective minds and go back to reckless bidding if bidding tools were suddenly banned in some way. We would just go back to manual sniping. And we would do less buying, because we can’t be at our computer all the time. So, as far as I can see, Ebay would want to keep us going. We’re ‘professional buyers’….

Topic: JBidwatcher Tips and Tricks / How Close to Snipe

There is an interesting (but incorrect) assumption that the aim of sniping is to bid at the last possible moment. It isn’t. Trying to do that can lose you the bid in a closely matched auction. This is because ebay requires a specific increase over the last bid.

For example, imagine an item currently displaying at 24 (pounds, dollars, it makes no difference). And two people want it. They are seasoned bidders, and estimate that it has a bid on of around 30. So Alice prepares a snipe for 31.63, while Bob decides to go for 32.18.

Now Bob might be expected to win, and he would in a ‘sealed-bid’ auction. But if he snipes at 5 seconds before closing, while Alice snipes at 8 seconds before, he will lose. What will happen is:

item price – 24 (max bid is actually 30.50)
Alice bid – 31.63
item price goes to Alice at 31.50
Bob bid – 32.18
Bob bid rejected – needed to be 32.50 or more.
Alice wins.

What you need to do is bid your maximum price just after the last time when somebody could see your bid and raise it. I have had people hovering over item, and reckon that the fastest someone can check bids and input another bid is about 7 seconds. So I go for that as a delay.

I could go for 5 seconds, but then I’m just laying myself open to being ‘sniped’ beforehand…

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Linux: "Time left" 1hr too much

@stanleymack
“… I suppose this could be an Ebay ploy because sniping helps keep buy prices down…”

I can’t see how. If an auction attracts a bid of £20 and you don’t snipe, the item sells for £20. If you snipe higher, the item sells for £21. Looks to me as if sniping puts the price UP. Just not as much as a bidding war. But we would never get involved in a bidding war anyway, so we aren’t losing anyone anything…

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Linux: "Time left" 1hr too much

Can’t see anything on their home page at 06:00 am GMT….

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Linux: "Time left" 1hr too much

I have just updated Java to 6-29, rebooted my machine, and run two more tests. Both auctions went down to 30 secs before end, and ‘prepared a snipe’ before I canceled them, so I think they would have gone the whole way. I suggest that people try a test auction as above, check their Java version, update it to the latest, and then retry the test auction again to see if there’s a difference. The results should help Morgan when he comes to look at the problem…

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Linux: "Time left" 1hr too much

Just tested it again. It’s an easy test – pick an auction with about 10 minutes to go, and put a bid on for less than the current price. That means the bid will fail to establish at 2 minutes to go, but that’s not important for the test.

Watch the JBidwatch countdown. In my case, fairly reliably, the Jbidwatcher countdown goes OK to about 5 mins to go – then it switches to 1 hour 5 minutes. If you look at the Information pop-up for the item in this state, you can see that it is indicating that the item auction end is one hour five minutes away, instead of 5 minutes. Unsurprisingly, the snipe will not fire at the correct time, and will either wait one hour, or jump back to the correct time on it’s own, at some point after the auction has ended…

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Linux: "Time left" 1hr too much

I’ve just noted that I was on Java 6-24, and the current is 6-29. I wonder if that might be an issue…?

Topic: JBidwatcher Help / Linux: "Time left" 1hr too much

Yup – I also just lost three auctions with hour-late bids.

I’m in the UK, my system clock was properly set, and the UK ebay time was displaying correctly on the ebay page. I put a snipe on three items this morning and Jbidwatcher bid for them 1 hour late.

As a test I picked a cheap item which was going to close in about 10 mins time, and put a snipe on. It correctly indicated a few minutes to go, but when I checked TimeSync, I found I was -16937. When I went back to the main page, I found Jbidwatcher was now indicating 1 hour 5 minutes to go. It ran past the proper bid time without making a bid. I then tried re-syncing, and after a few goes it went back to the correct time, and then set the snipe to red, as it was in the past…

It looks like there is a bug of some kind in the timing code, and JBidwatcher 2.1.6-0-geb75036 cannot currently be relied upon to bid in a timely fashion….

Topic: General Sniping Discussion / Sniping Considerations

The one non-intuitive thing to consider is the sniping time. Most people seem to think that the sooner you can make it to the close time, the better. This is wrong.

Let’s say A and B are sniping on an item marked at $5. It actually has a bid of $7 on it. A and B are seasoned snipers, and both know that a good price for this is a bit over 8 dollars. So A is going to bid 8.15, and B is going to bid 8.45.

If B bids first, he will win. But if A bids first, the marked price will go up to $8, and B’s bid will not be accepted, even though it is higher. When you get good at pricing things, you will run into this issue. The answer is to bid, not as late as possible. Bid as early as possible, but late enough to stop a reply bid. I find that somwhere between 6 and 8 seconds is best – I have had a manual response bid beat me once when I was at 9 seconds….