If your financial situation changes, an item isn’t what you thought it was, or for any number of other reasons, you may want to cancel a bid on eBay. Here’s how to do that, as long as you follow the rules.

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, eBay stipulates that you can only retract a bid if:

In practice, it is possible to withdraw bids even if none of these circumstances apply.

With this warning in mind, you can complete the retraction by visiting eBay's Retract Bid webpage. To do this, you can either open the retraction form or go to eBay's Help pages and navigate to the section on Retracting Bids, where you can find an alternative, newer link for retracting bids.