There is someone that can confirm what happened.
The auctioneer running the auction.
So, as Lyn and I have both suggested, you should contact the auctioneer to find out what occurred. Otherwise, we can only hypothesize about what might have occurred.

Jim Ford
Professional Auctioneer & Auction Marketing for the 21st Century

Jim, I agree with your points 100% and often find myself having to explain the same to our bidders.

The downside of having so many different ways to bid at auctions now is that one doesn't always know how the bids are going to be executed.

I frequently get calls from bidders after an auction that had placed pre-bids prior to the auction. They have typically had the high bid prior to the start of the auction and then expect to have won the item once the auction is done. I explain to them that their having the highest bid prior to the auction was only in comparison to any other pre-bids that had been left. Ultimately, there are people at the auction, bidding on the phone, bidding live on the internet and submitting absentee bids through other methods that you are in competition with.

I appreciate Curt's dislike of the idea of a "blind auction." But, depending on the bidding method you choose to use, the idea of a "blind auction" may be a reality you have to accept. What I mean by that is simply if you choose to place a pre-bid and there are no other pre-bids or at least no other legitimate pre-bids, then you might as well be bidding blind. Let me give an example to clarify what I mean by this:

As a bidder, you find an item on AuctionZip that you want to place a pre-bid on. For this scenario, let's say it is an ounce of gold with a value of approximately $1,000. At that time, there are no other pre-bids and the starting bid is $5. You can bid $5 or anything above that amount. But, you are participating in a "blind auction" if there are no other bids. If you choose to bid $5 and you are the high bidder when the pre-bidding ends, do you expect to win the gold? If you bid $1,000, there really isn't any way to know if that will be competitive, either. The more realistic scenario would be if you were to bid $800, which some may consider reasonable, and there is an underbid of $700. You're not flying blind in a sense that your $800 bid seems to be competitive. But, given the market value of $1,000, you may still be way off given the bidding at the auction.

In the end, I agree that it is always advisable to bid the maximum you are willing ot pay.

Curt... if the bidding happened exactly above with X,Y,Z, and you being 4 separate bidders this is what happened:

When a bidder places a bid at AuctionZip, that bid is held until the auctioneer either approves or denies the bid. It is at the auctioneer's complete discretion how and when they do this.

It appears as though X came in first and bid $5
Z came in next and bid $15
Y came in next and bid $14
and you came in last and bid $6

When you came in and bid $6 you might have noticed that the bid was at $5 but if you looked at the bid count it would have read (3). The parenthesis around the 3 means that some of these bids are pending and have not been reflected as of yet in the bidding.

If the auctioneer had approved these bids prior to you bidding, you would have seen the bid at $15 and the bid count would have been 3 (no parenthesis).

We are working on further improvements to our bidding system and welcome all feedback and comments.