Did I Miss Out!?! Pretty Darn Annoyed!

Just noticed I posted this in the wrong forum! Could someone move it?

All cleaned at one point and quite odd they thought the 32D in the mix.

As far as the bidding, the way a max bid will work. Ex. You set your max bid as $50, someone else sets they're max bid at $200. Well since yours was the second highest bid, the winning bid will only be just over that, say at $50.02. You will never really know what the winning bidders highest bid would be....unless yours is higher of course.

With this you have to decide the highest price you're willing to pay for the item, and place that as your bid. Simply placing a bid just over the current bid amount is typically not always enough. This is why you typically see such big jumps in price at the last second.

Hope that wasn't too confusing.

With ebay's standard bid increments, if the winning bidder's max bid was much higher than yours, he would have won it at $1 over your bid. Since he won it by just 2 cents, he likely won it at his max bid. I would have been annoyed, too!

Thank you for your in-depth responses! I am relieved to hear that you guys agree with the possibility that the coin was cleaned — given I hate cleaned coins, I am completely over missing out on this auction (LOL). And yes, I thought it was odd too but that's just the way the seller was selling the lots. They knew what they had though so I'm not really suspicious. However, it was a very eye appealing coin.

Other bidder had a max high bid in. When you placed your snipe bid normally the automatic bidding would have bid one increment higher than you an his account. But his max bid was less than one increment higher so it bid his maximum which was 2 cents higher than your snipe bid. If your snipe had been 5 cents higher your would have won and beat him by 3 cents. If your snipe had been more than an increment higher than his max bid, you would have wone at one increment over his max bid.

If you were both sniping and your bad had come in first he would have lost because even though his bid was higher it was not one increment higher than the previous high bid, which would have been yours. If his snipe was first he would have won.

Remember Yahoo! Auctions? They implemented that and closed up shop within 18 months. Buyers HATED it and left, then the sellers left soon after.

It is a true auction, but it works similar to a mail bid auction where the auction ends at a specific time. The one difference being that unlike a mail bid auction you know what the current high bid is right up to the close of the auction. With the old mail bids you didn't. You just submitted your max bid without having any idea what the competition was like and then found out the results after it closed. Auctions can have several different formats and it isn't really fair to complain that an auction set up as one format doesn't function as a different one. You know what the rules are when you go in and you accept those rules when you submit a bid.

To be honest, I enjoy the snipe bidding - makes it fun and sometimes actually gets me anxious (not that that's good but the adrenaline/thrill is definitely there). Its like a game! One in which you could either greatly profit or really mess up.

@Conder Your explanations make sense, thank you! Better luck next time for me I guess!!