Listia Auctions are now Real-Time

Earlier today, we removed the live countdown timer on auction pages because we were receiving complaints about it being confusing.  Some users thought that since the timer was live, the current high bid and number of bids were live as well.  This wasn’t the case (you had to refresh to see updated bid info), so we decided to take it down to avoid confusion.

However, after we did that, many of you then expressed concerns that you rely on the countdown timer and do not like to refresh the page so often.  So, rather than continuing to compromise on the issue, we’ve been working hard all day and night to make BOTH the countdown timer and the bid information update in real-time.  It wasn’t easy but it also wasn’t as hard as we thought… and in the end we think it was worth the effort.

Now, when you are viewing an auction, you will see the bid amount increase as other people bid on the auction.  It will not update immediately if there is still a lot of time left on the auction, but once you are down to the final seconds, the bid amount should never be off by more than a few seconds depending on your computer’s processing power, Internet speeds, server loads, etc.  You will also be notified if you get outbid in real-time so you can immediately submit a new bid. Although this is great for last-second bidding, we still recommend getting your highest bid in well in advance of the final seconds just to be sure 🙂

Thanks for everyone’s continued feedback… we have come a long way and there are still lots of new things coming!