Hi. I placed a snipe this evening but I noticed as I was watching the countdown, that BidSlammer was approximately 30 seconds out of sync with the ebay countdown for the item.
Therefore, even though I had set a 3 second snipe, from what I could see, the snipe would have been placed 30 seconds before the end of the auction as the system did not appear to be in sync with eBay, giving another bidder ample time to increase their bid.
I cancelled the snipe and bid manually in the last 3 seconds.
I'd just like to know for future, whether this is always the case or was there some other issue here.
From what I could see, I did not feel confident that my snipe would be placed 3 seconds before the end of the auction.
Thanks.

Hello,
Thank you for your question about syncing time with eBay. You made an accurate observation, but it's not actually a problem because the countdown timer that you see in your browser uses your browser time, which is based on your computer's time.
*Our* clocks use a program called NTP in which all participating computers (like ours and eBay's) are synchronized within milliseconds of each other.
The next time you see a drift, just refresh your browser page, and you will see the time auto-correct. The more active you are in your browser, the more it will drift. We considered removing the "countdown" feature as it just isn't a good representation of how accurate we truly are.
Below is a link to the Wikipedia page on NTP if you are interested in learning more. Thanks for taking the time to write in, please let us know if we can help further.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Time_Protocol