No. Your bid stands. You can close the tab, lose signal, take a call, or walk out of the room, and it makes no difference to a bid you have placed.
Why
Bids live on the server, not in the page you are looking at. The page is a window onto the auction; closing the window does not change the auction.
So a bid you placed is timestamped, recorded and competing whether or not you are watching. If nobody goes higher, you win while you are not there.
What is preserved
- Every bid you placed.
- Your position — top bidder or outbid.
- Any maximum bid, which keeps bidding for you up to your number while you are away. What a maximum bid is
- Any pre-bid on an item that has not opened yet.
- Wins, with their payment windows running.
What you will have missed
- The chat, which does not scroll back far.
- Items that opened and closed while you were out.
See what soldshows what has gone. - A seller's description of an item. This is the real cost: you can rejoin and see a price without having heard what was said about the thing. Do not bid on an item whose description you missed.
The one thing to do on returning
Check your orders. If something closed in your favour while you were away, a payment window is running — and if you were not watching when it ended, you have longer, but not unlimited. How will I know if I won?
This is the actual risk of leaving: not losing a bid, but winning without noticing. An unpaid win is a strike.
Rejoining
Open the show again. There is no penalty, no queue and no limit on how many times.
Rejoining is also the fix for most video problems, because a fresh player starts with a fresh buffer. The seller is answering things before I see them
If the show ends while you are away
Whatever you won is in your orders with its window running. Whatever you did not win needs nothing from you.
The sensible way to bid if you cannot stay
Set a maximum on the one item you want and leave. That is what it is for — it bids the smallest step that keeps you on top, never past your number, with nobody able to see the number. Watching an hour of a show to defend a single item is the thing a maximum bid exists to replace.
More: how bidding works, what happens when you win, how to place a bid.