Weird Problems With Gavelsnipe

[GasHouseGang]

I recently had a strange experience with Gavelsnipe (an online auction sniping service). I've used this service for a number of years and never had any problems, and it's free so that's really amazing. I had decided to bid on several items which all ended around the same time. I figured I'd lose some, win one, and when I did I would not bid on the other items. Well, one of the items had ended and I lost. Oh well, next item ended a few hours later. When I check on it, it was gone from the list of items I was bidding on. Odd, but that usually means the seller pulled the item. OK, so next two items were ending in a few hours. Have to leave for awhile. I come back, check and both items are gone from the list on my items to bid on at Gavelsnipe. Did they both get pulled too? I go to ebay and sign in and find out I've won the last two items plus the one hours earlier! Now I owe nearly $500 for the items I've won and I have three items instead of one. Has anyone else experienced this type of problem before or am I just the lucky one?

[Jaybird]

hasn't happened to me and I have used them as well. Any chance the end times were different then you thought they were? The one ended already when you checked back which is why it was gone? time zone issue while traveling?

Otherwise, doesn't make any sense and I couldn't begin to guess.

[GasHouseGang]

Jason, I've never experienced anything like this either. I feel it must be a software error of some type. I wrote to Gavelsnipe after it happened to leave feedback, describing the fact that the snipes occurred but didn't show in my "history". Soon afterwards the missing auctions were in my history with me being the winning bidder. So apparently they fixed that problem. However, the final auction prices were still wrong. So I wrote to them again explaining that the final values were incorrect, and soon afterward the final prices were corrected. I'm guessing the software was just not correctly picking up the information from ebay. Hopefully this is an isolated issue and won't affect anyone else's auctions. I should have just signed into my ebay account after the first auction and I would have seen that I was the "winner". Then I could have pulled my othe snipes. But since I had never experienced any problems with Gavelsnipe I didn't even think to check.
I do want to add, I love Gavelsnipe and have used it for several years with absolutely no problems. Like I said, I hope this was just an isolated incident.

[GasHouseGang]

I thought someone out there might like to know the followup to my problems with Gavelsnipe. Gavelsnipe responded to my question about what went wrong. Here were their replies:

First reply: "eBay has made a change to their site that is affecting the refresh function. We're looking into it."

Second reply: "There was a change to the eBay site that affected the GavelSnipe refresh function. This caused your last two auctions to not be refreshed to your snipe list after your second auction executed. This has been fixed. Your history has been restored to include those auctions.

You should try bid groups when you are bidding on multiple auctions in order to win just one item. GavelSnipe will cancel the remaining snipes after the item is won."

I never knew about the "bid groups" so I might try that in the future if I'm bidding on multiple auctions of similar items.

[deebro041]

Thanks for the info David!