Cancel Bids More Than 12 Hours Before Auction End
Provided there are more than 12 hours before the associated auction ends, you can cancel, or retract, any bid you place on eBay. That said, it’s stipulated by eBay you can only retract a bid if:
You’ve accidentally bid the wrong amount (e.g. $900 instead of $9).The seller has “significantly” changed the description of the item.The seller isn’t responding to your messages.
In practice, it’s possible to retract bids even if none of these circumstances apply.
How to Retract a Bid on eBay
With this warning in mind, you can complete the retraction by navigating to eBay’s Retract Bid webpage. To do this, you can either access the retraction form, or you can navigate to eBay’s Help pages and go to the section on retracting bids, where you can find an alternative, newer link for retracting bids. In cases where you use the old retraction form, here’s what you do:
How to Cancel a Bid on eBay via the Help Page
And here’s how you retract a bid via eBay’s Help pages:
Cancel Bids Less Than 12 Hours Before Auction End
It’s also possible to retract an eBay bid when an auction is scheduled to finish in under 12 hours. However, a few differences apply in such cases. For one, you can retract bids only within an hour of having made them. In other words, if there are less than 12 hours before an auction ends, any bid you place during this period must be retracted within an hour of making it. Assuming this condition holds, you can then go about retracting exactly as described in the section above.
How to Cancel a Bid by Contacting the Seller
Nonetheless, there is, in fact, one way in which you can attempt to have a bid canceled even when an hour or more has elapsed. To do this, you have to contact the seller and ask for them to cancel the bid:
How to Remove a Bid on eBay’s Mobile App
Retracting a bid on the eBay mobile app is pretty much identical to retracting a bid on the eBay website. You can go to the retraction form, or you can follow the process below.
