Bid increment issues in Brockleman Auction
 

Anyone have these issues with other Simple Auction Site AHs?

I have several bids in the $400-600 range where the increment is showing as just a few dollars, when it should be 10%. I've been outbid on numerous lots by just a few $$$.

You'd think the Brockleman team would be manning the phones/e-mails on auction night, but I've received no response to either method of communication.

Here are just a few examples where the numbers are: opening bid, my high bid, current high bid

Attachment 634653

If someone had placed a specific bid before your underbid that wasn't a full increment above your bid, they would still be the bid leader at a seemingly smaller bid than allowed. The nice thing is that tells you that you are the immediate underbidder and that the next bid will take the lead. To me it's good news.

Are you saying that bid increments aren't fixed?

So look at what likely happened: On the Bradley, the current bid from your competitor was an entered Max Bid $766 when the 10% increment you placed got you to $764. The original bidder retained the lead with a new current bid of $766. You would have to increase the new bid $77 to take the lead again. But you could enter a max bid of $80 and force your next competitor to outbid you by $85.

Seems like an Easter Egg that allows you to pre-bid the next increment under the Max Bid procedure. Now that you know it exists, use it to your advantage.

Scott B did call me back. He brought this to the attention of Simple Auction Site. I don't really want to get into the nuts and bolts of what led to certain discrepancies, because they (SAS) are unsure of how to fix the issue. But I appreciated Scott chatting with me, and with SAS.

I see what you're saying swarmee/John, but why would the auction be set to where one bidder sees $766 and another bidder sees $764?? These bids are in a drop-down format, not being entered like on eBay. And what if I want to max at $764 and have my bid in first? Someone should have to outbid me by $76, not $2.

Most sites let you either bid the next increment, or let you set a Max bid, but they don't expose the max bid until it's been outbid. Otherwise it would be like eBay where people would continue to string bid to expose what the max bid is, and it looks a lot like shilling.

I'm saying the person who bid before you put in the max bids, but since they weren't "open", all you knew was they took the previous increment. Once you bid the next increment, your bid wasn't high enough to be the leader, so their bid stretched to their max. Nobody else but the initial bidder is given that "benefit." And they only had it because they bid a max bid before you did.

You shouldn’t be able to max bid anything but incremental bids, no in-between bids. They can set the software for that.

Awesome move by Scott to reply so fast. I imagine he's got his hands full today :)

I had the exact same thing happen when he auctioned off all the T210s. I put in max bids hoping to make someone pay up to outbid me but then ended up getting outbid by $1. I don't bid in auctions so figured that is how the bidding there worked. Since it was the same for everyone never gave it much thought.

That makes some sense. However, when I was bidding in this auction, I was actually noted as the high bidder on one lot for several hours and then I receive a notification that I was outbid by $1.00! That simply shouldn't happen. On a different lot, I was the high bidder throughout and then near the end of the auction one bid came in, and I was outbid by $8 and lost. Absolutely not acceptable and this needs to be corrected asap.

Ah, I was not aware of that. You should have not been able to be outbid by less than the minimum increment, I agree. Sounds like a software issue, but hopefully the auction site gets it fixed.

And yes kudos to Scott for replying to my concerns very quickly yesterday. I understand he couldn't help but so much at the time.

My apologies to anyone affected by this glitch. It only happened to 3 bidders as far as I can tell and each time it was when a mix of max and straight bids were placed. The admin at Simple and I looked at every possible reason and just could not find any error in the setup. The 10% increment was selected for the bidding increments in my auctions since day one and never changed, but for some reason a few lots(about 10 or less) were affected.

I am not 100% sure but I believe the problem may lie with the rounding of the 10% jumps which the software MAY be calculating incorrectly between the two different types of bids(max and straight).

Unfortunately, this was not caught until the last day and despite every attempt no firm error/solution could be found.

It was less than 1% of the lots that were not incremented(is that a word?) correctly but in my mind still 1% too many.

This will be fleshed out and corrected before the next auction.

Scott