I received a question from a gentleman last week. His inquiry was unusual and odd I thought at first. He had asked why a certain auction closed with a buy-it-now before the auction was supposed to begin.
There was no auction number in the text he sent and he wasn’t sure of the auction number. I thought about it for a while and suddenly I figured out what had happened. At least I think this is what happened!
When we upload auction data programming that we added to the script includes a starting date and time. The maximum length of an auction is now 7 days. Generally we upload the data all at once several hours, or in some cases days before the auction actually starts.
For instance there are hundreds of auctions now set to start tonight and end on Memorial day that you won’t see if you go into choochooauctions.com. At least I don’t think there is a way to find them on that site.
However if you click on a link in traincity.com that is entitled ‘Current Traincity, Inc. auctions, that shows all of the auctions including the ones that haven’t started yet.
Over the years I think people have learned this trick and at any rate they have access to bidding before the auction is visible on choochoo.com or they can buy-it-now. If they do a buy-it-now technically this will close the auction before it ever opened. So that’s the answer to this question. The actual link is: http://www.choochooauctions.com/cgi-bin/ua/vsoa.pl?usernum=1&seller=traincity
Is this unfair? It may have been before, but now it isn’t a secret anymore and everyone that reads this has access to this information.
Save that link. Make it a shortcut on your desktop. Who knows maybe you will see something that you can’t live without and place a buy-it-now someday.
We normally upload auctions between 2PM and 6PM on weekdays. Auctions generally start appearing a little later in the evening.
Well thanks for asking this question. This is an interesting quirk.
