Have had similar experiences (and worse). Very frustrating. Good tip.

Let me see if I can explain this from the seller perspective.

As a seller on ebay, you have the right to cancel any and/or all bids on the item you are selling up until 8 hours before the item's auction ends. You can also end the item up until the same time period. After that time frame you are committed to go through with the listing, however after it ends you can cancel the transaction if you have a good reason, such as lost or out of stock, etc. Lots of sellers have their items listed on more than one selling site at the same time.......craigslist, etc. Hence the term "available for sale locally and may be ended at any time if it sells locally" usually being put into the auction description. These are reasons a legit seller could cancel your bids and end the auction early. If ebay ends them and not the seller, then yes, its possible it could have been a fraudulent listing, or a hacked account, or some other legit reason ebay had to end the item. Sometimes they end listings if the seller has not paid their seller fees or if there are many recent unresolved disputes with winners of their auctions.

Hope this help clears things up.

Keep this in mind, even though you are the high bidder on an item, you are not the new owner of the item until the auction ends with your winning bid and you have paid for it. Until then, it still belongs to the seller and they have the right to change their mind about selling it up until those eight hours before it ends. Ever hear of seller's remorse?

Yes, ebay should automatically add items you've bid on into your watch list, but they don't. Somewhere there's a list of what you're bidding on, but who bids enough to keep a list?

Sellers can cancel bids, but it's rare, because ebay hates that and dings sellers for it. The item could have broken, they may have sold it offline somewhere, or maybe it looked like it wasn't going to bring the right price and the seller wasn't too picky about rules.

ebay will pull items that violate their terms but I'm assuming this was a drum and so isn't in their prohibited category.

To be clear, the issue is that a "watcher" is advised of a change of status, but a "bidder" is not. That doesn't make sense. It was the eBay person that referred to the term "fraudulent", not me. I didn't see it as fraudulent relative to the seller. I simply see it as a problem with eBay's system. The eBay person may have been thinking eBay had an internal obligation for correction because they admitted many contacts on the subject with no action on their part.

I also am not concerned that the seller pulled out. As you say, they can do that. It is the aspect of the bid disappearing and the bidder has no information about it even though someone only watching does.

It's also odd that the only place you find a bid you've won is in purchase history. Wouldn't you think they'd want to tell directly that you have won and direct you to purchase history so you can carry out your end of the bargain by paying up?

Dan!

Seeing as I am the "in absentia" webmaster and the mod .. I'm going to move this over to the GENERAL category. Carry on I say, carry on! BEST!!!

Tommyp

Happened to me as well Lame