How to mess up on eBay…

So something funny happened today to me and my wife. Tina's been reading a lot about the leather goods from Saddleback Leather and decided to acquire a few pieces to test and write reviews on them. She found that Saddleback Leather lists their products on eBay regularly (as well as selling on their own storefront). I send her this USA Today article on sniping and suggested she use AuctionSniper (which I use when bidding).

This evening when the auction for the briefcase was coming to a close she found that the AuctionSniper website was down and was worried that the snipe wouldn't go through. I said it was probably just the front end and it might still send in the bid. She was concerned because with only 10 minutes to go, the bid was still much lower than her max bid. I suggested that she simply login and bid on eBay (manually snipe) and eBay won't have a problem since it's the same account. I then left to run some errands. A few minutes later I received a phone call from my wife telling me that I won the auction (because she used my AuctionSniper account) BUT she had driven up the price because she had bid the same amount with HER account. So, instead of getting a great deal on the briefcase, we managed to pay our maximum (which is still a nice discount from full price). I guess we should have made sure we were actually using the same account…