Jennifer - three minutes gives one hundred people a chance to outbid you. So does one minute, thirty seconds, etc. If you want to insure you will never lose an auction (as long as the bid doesn't go higher than what you're willing to pay), then you must, as much as you hate others who do it to you, snipe at the last minute. I used to have to sit here at the computer, calculating bid times, timing it right down to fifteen seconds before the close of an auction. All that is unnecessary now because of a place called esnipe.com. If you register there, I believe there's a trial period that costs nothing to use the service. Once the trial period is over you have to purchase "bid points" but they're like ten or twenty bucks. The point is, I purchased one set of bid points for twenty bucks and that was over a year ago, so it's good value for money and I simply don't lose auctions.