How To Retract Your Bid
From the Ebay item listing, click on the link marked

History: 9 bids (£0.99 starting bid)

Bidders: You can retract your bid under certain circumstances only.

Will This Harm My Feedback Rating?
Although it is not our job to educate and train ebay buyers, (that's what ebay's help system is for), we publish this advice here to clarify our view.
No, retracting a bid will not harm your feedback rating. Most sellers will not even notice, and any reasonable ones would appreciate you correcting your error as soon as possible.
What does happen though, is that a bid retractions line gets added to your feedback page. This simply shows how many bid retractions you have made in the past 6 months. Our guess is that this is to stop people abusing the retraction facility to discover their competitors' bids. If you were to make a habit of frequent cancellations, it would not look good, although we do not know whether or how Ebay monitor your number of retractions. As they disappear from view after six months, it makes no permanent difference to your record.

Don't Try To Shift Your Responsibility
Please do not e-mail or contact us to ask us to retract your bid. you mad the mistake, you should correct it. It is unfair and unreasonable to expect other people to correct your errors for you.
We don't know about other sellers, but it's a full time job for us and our staff just to keep up with processing, packing and shipping items sold. We do not always have the time to respond to all e-mails promptly. If you e-mail us expecting us to correct your error for you there is a danger we may not see your e-mail, or be able to respond to it, in time.
If you fail to retract to bid before the auction ends, you should not be surprised if the seller is unhappy with you, and decides that you because failed to retract your bid before the end of the auction, you deserve negative feedback.

Unreasonable Person
Today we had a telephone call from a person who we will politely refer to as an unreasonable person, although that is a polite version of what we would actually like to call him.
This person phoned us in January 2004 to tell us he had overbid on a 2004 Uncirculated Gold Sovereign, and asked us to cancel his bid, apparently the auction had not yet finished. We politely explained that we could not cancel his bid (*), indeed the whole system would get very chaotic if anybody could cancel anybody else's bids, but that he could do this for himself by following ebay's help system. For some reason best known to himself, he failed to do so.
A month later he phoned us again and asked why we had just cancelled a number of auctions. One of our senior staff members politely and patiently explained to him. During a conversation lasting about twenty minutes it became clear just from hearing one side of the conversation, that he was not happy with the explanation, and had also brought up again the matter of the 2004 sovereign. In addition, he was insisting on speaking to the boss. We employ intelligent well educated people who are literate, numerate, polite, and patient. It annoys, nay insults, our staff and me, when somebody insists that the only person who can help them is the ultimate boss. Imagine wanting to complain at Tesco and insisting that you speak to the company chairman directly, and only the chairman will suffice. I volunteered to speak to him, and allowed him to waste about a half hour of my time.
First I got a re-run of the 2004 sovereign story, apparently it was one of his first forays on ebay. This does not explain why he thought he was bidding on a proof sovereign. In our listing we specify about three or more times that the item we are offering is an uncirculated bullion sovereign in mint condition. We also discuss the intrinsic (scrap gold) content of a sovereign, and quote the Royal Mint's selling price (£84.95), so people can compare prices, and make an informed judgement about a sensible price to bid. The only place we mention a proof is after the images, where we explain that we have used photographs of proof coins rather than the uncirculated ones we are offering, we also explain why we use proof photos. We try to make things idiot proof!
This misguided soul tells me that the maximum bid he placed was £100. If he really thought that he was going to be able to buy a proof sovereign 3 months before it was issued at £35 to £40 below issue price, then he must live in cloud cuckoo land. While he accepted that it was his mistake in not reading the offer, he still wanted to complain and moan about this purchase. Our view is that when a buyer makes a bid in an auction, then fails to take the opportunity to retract it, then it is very unreasonable of them to expect us to reduce the price, or agree to cancelling the transaction. In any case, we do not know any method for doing so on ebay without filing a Non Paying Bidder Report, which we presume counts against the buyers ebay record. It would also lose us a sale to the under-bidder (we do not believe in using ebay's 'Second Chance' scheme). If we were to agree to cancel the sale, ebay may suspect that we were colluding with buyers to fraudulently avoid paying them their sales commission. We would and will not do so, and we would prefer not to leave ourselves open even to the slightest suspicion of it.
He had not actually bid on any of our withdrawn items, but was merely thinking about doing so. I was able to inform him that we very rarely cancel any sales with over one minute to run, and it is usually in the last thirty seconds. As he informed us that he did not know he long our auctions still had to run, we do not believe that he would had managed to complete the bidding process in time anyway.
He also seemed to think that it was unfair that we expected an overbidder to complete the transaction, but would withdraw an item which appeared to be about to sell for a loss. We explained that if we allowed an underpriced item to be "knocked down", then we would honour the contract, but that withdrawing it early was our right.
At the end of the telephone conversation, this person informed me that he was still going to ask ebay about cancelling sales, so when I say that I wasted my time, it appears to be an accurate assessment.
We are currently considering whether it would be advisable to bar him from bidding on any of our items, as it may help avoid further problems in future.

98% Satisfaction
Over 98% of our buyers express satisfaction and more with their purchases and transactions with us, indeed we have a high number of repeat buyers. We would prefer to avoid doing business with the small minority of unreasonable people and professional complainers. In addition, why should the service we give our loyal customers be jeopardised because we are having to spend an uneconomic amount of time with the few whingers.

Go Elsewhere
The best advice we could give this particular person is to go elsewhere.
He will find plenty of other sellers on ebay and elsewhere. His main problem will be that many of them may be amateurs, part time dealers, or dishonest people, who fail to accurately describe their goods, or simply don't send them.
He may get an occasional bargain, but he also runs the risk of getting something he didn't bargain for.
We could recommend a seller "boredface" who had been offering a free 2002 gold sovereign with every purchase of an "aerial booster" for £19.99, or a free one ounce krugerrand if you pay between £19.99 and £39.99, two if you pay up to £59.99, and three if you pay up to £79.99 The item listings did say that purchasers should read their website for terms and conditions, but failed to specify a link to, or any other way of finding, said website. Clearly the offers were too good to be true, and made with fraudulent intention. The seller came to our attention because they, like many others, were stealing our copyright images.

(*) We have since learned that sellers can also remove bids, although as explained above, we do not see why sellers should expect other people to have to clean up their mess for them.
Another non-buying bidder recently also asked us to cancel a sale after it had completed. We are always reluctant to do so, for a number of reasons.
Firstly it should be the sellers responsibility to ascertain what the is bidding on, the amount of his bid, what currency he is bidding in, and all other aspects of his bidding.
Secondly it is always possible for the buyer to correct his own mistake by retracting his bid providing he notices his error before the auction ends.
Thirdly, it has deprived us of a sale.
Fourthly it has deprived the underbidders their chance of making a purchase, and wasted their time. They may have wanted the item before a particular date, perhaps as a gift. For whatever reason, many bidders do not return to bid on a repeat item.
Fifthly, Ebay do not like sales to be cancelled, as they lose commission. Some dishonest buyers and sellers get together privately to complete the deal without Ebay's knowledge and participation. This behaviour is probably fraudulent and illegal, it is certainly unethical. Any sellers, and buyers, who repeatedly agreed to cancel sale may come under suspicion by Ebay of avoiding paying their commissions. Please do not ask to to participate in any actions or behaviour which may risk placing us under such suspicion.

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