There are sellers I like to bid on that have all of their items end at the same exact moment. I tried doing a 3 second lead time on everything but for the auctions that just happened I should have had the high bid for many but I won 0. Why didn't I win a single auction and what should I do to make sure this doesn't happen in the future?

Hello Daniel,
Thank you for your question about your snipes. On the 12th we had posted a message at the top of the page. We had to perform an emergency reboot. So it was human intervention, not a system stability issue. Rest assured the systems are ok.
The number of snipes in a given moment shouldn't matter since there are redundant systems and the load is balanced.
I hope this has been explained to your satisfaction. Please let me know if you have any other questions.

Thank you for the prompt response, so does this mean I can just do a 1 second lead time for all of my snipes on items that end at the same time? I see that the 1 second option no longer says experimental

Well, the "adding snipes into our system" is independent of "lead time." There was a limit set of adding a max of 100 snipes per minute. I increased it just for you. :-D
In regard to lead time: The 1-second is a marketing thing we started, then everyone else copied the idea. It should only be used for _extremely_ competitive items. I will explain.
I looked at your bid history. I noticed that there are usually several bidders, which leads to a lot of "tie" situations. In those cases you lose because your bid came in after theirs. It has to do with the minimum bid increment.
For you, I'd suggest 5 seconds across the board. This accomplishes three goals.
1. Your bid is kept secret.
2. There isn't enough time for someone to react to your snipe.
3. Your earlier bid will win in a tie situation, because they have to meed the minimum bid increment to beat you.
What do you think? This would make a good blog article and your feedback would be appreciated.
p.s. Please try the new Slam-it 2.0 tool if you have a moment.

Sounds good, I will try 5 seconds on everything and see how that works, thanks for the input and explanations

My pleasure. I think you'll find you win more often.