I tried to buy the vice and was prepared to pay up to £32 but it failed. Can you help me work out why?

I set up a snipe using Bidslammer which I have used a number of times before without problems. It submits a bid at the last minute up to a maximum you set. This time it failed, saying that the seller require a credit card to be on file with eBay.

I was going to pay with my PayPal account as normal. This is linked both to my bank account and my credit card. I don't see where else I could put a credit card in my eBay or PayPal profiles. Nor do I see anything in the listing about requiring a credit card on file: PayPal is a listed method.

Have you any idea what went wrong? Did you said a requirement for a credit card and if so, where in the listing does it show that?

Obviously the chance of the vice has gone but I'm anxious to sort out the problem in case it occurs again.

Thanks for your help

Hello Jim,

That is a message you have to clear up at eBay. Could you do us a favor, and log into eBay, check to make sure there are no warning dialogs? Let us know what you find out and we can take the next step.

There's nothing - no messages and my account details look normal. Getting in touch with eBay by email is not easy unless you know a better way.

Thanks

Hello Jim,

The error we have on this end is that the credentials are wrong. Please enter your eBay credentials here and make sure you receive the green "success" dialog when you submit:

https://bidslammer.com/user/prefs/

If that does not work, let us know and we can take the next step.

Interesting. The credentials should not have changed, and looked OK. Adding from my watch list gave an error message and later a database error about duplicates, but did work. Reinserting my credentials looked the same but did work, although not all the watch list was imported even after several tries. I found something cheap for my wife to bid on as a test. The first snipe failed - blocked by seller - perhaps because there was no way to specify the size required. The second went through OK. It looks as if the problem is sorted (unless you know different), but it would have been useful to know beforehand there was a problem. I missed out on a good price. No way of checking before sniping, I suppose?

Is there a way to delete from the watch list? Removing items from eBay and importing again does not work.

Hello Jim,

We do check everything each time you come to the site, but unfortunately once in a blue moon, eBay will still kick back the login page as if the credentials are wrong. We only see this about twice a year. If the import worked ok then I can't explain it, I'm afraid. But I can definitely tell you I saw the login page get returned when we logged you in.

We always test our new releases on items in the eBay "test items category": http://www.ebay.com/sch/Test-Auctions-/14112/i.html

We don't have a delete feature for watch list, since they would just re-import the next time around .. and we found that people didn't want them to stay deleted. We haven't figured out a way to handle both situations easily, but always open to ideas. ;)