Item i was watching/bidding on has vanished

[EveningHare]

so i was watching an item, had the page up with the timer on it - and it suddenly vanished (6seconds to go ish)

and there was a message , item is not available, heres something else...?

Ebay? Could be some one emailed the seller and made an offer so that the seller will just sell it to them. It will be listed as a buy it now and the person who made the offer to the seller will be the only one who can buy it.

Yes eBay (sorry, thought I had posted in the eBay section)

Was very annoying
Surely they can't do that if there are bids on it though

No, a seller can’t withdraw an item in the last 24 hours of an auction, if there are bids on it. Very strange.

Go back to your page showing watched items. Is it there as sold? Maybe there was a time lag on your computer / mobile hence it disappearing with a few seconds to go?

Nope definitely not there

The page changed to 'item no longer available '
Just so weird

You can sell to the top bidber early and it closes it.

or it could be ebay has shot the posting down, i had some KLM ceramic dutch houses, one set empty and unsealed the other set sealed with bols in them, these are more collectors items, 8 days into a ten day listing, ebay shut the listing down as violating booze regs, so ive had to unseal them get rid of the drink inside and relist them

issey, have you looked at the listing restrictions? It used to be OK to sell them as long as you made it clear you were selling them for the container, would be interesting to know what the rules are now.

As for the original question, it might have been pulled, but Ebay have been messing with the site in the last week or so and many things have not been working as they should. I have had log-ins in various languages, pages not loading, and changes in My Ebay. They are also messing with search so much that it is impossible to find an item that was there the day before unless it is saved in watched items, repeating the search doesn't work, things go missing.

My snipes have worked fine, but they go in a bit earlier, usually around 10 secs. That annoying thing of taking you to a page of stuff you would never dream of looking at tends to mean it is sold so I would guess that the Ebay clock was wrong. You could look in completed/sold items and see if you can find out what happened.