AS is great but I'm pissed now!

snipersarabAuctionSniper Support

quote:
however those once in a while times where you refresh something and it takes a long time on the item hiccups are throwing off the algorithm and causing it to bid say 30 seconds earlier.

Hiccups wouldnt effect our lead times very much. Most items with 30 second+ lead times are specific times of the day.

quote:
being so i'm curious as to the actual time out of that 30 seconds that it takes AS to send and ebay to process the actual bid request.

Nearly 100% is eBay accepting it. We monitor for every single snipe all sorts of the timing aspects of it, how long it takes us to do everything involved with the snipe on our end, and when we send it to eBay, and when we receive a response back. There is pretty much zero slowdown on our end at any time, but eBays reply times to snipes sent often reaches 30 seconds or more during their peaks.

It's not our servers, our network, our internet connection or anything else. It's purely how quickly eBay can reply at peak times.

I know for certain that our adjustments save a couple hundred snipes a day.

2/16/042:52 PM

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santakroozMember

quote:
must have some experience in this field, business, or customer service. In either case I like your post, and hopefully it will help others to understand our side of things a little more too.

thanks - I'm in software development, but I just read the faq's and tutorials and thought about it a little before I signed up.

thanks for the nice system! -sk

[made your quote work, was missing a / ]

[This message was edited by Sniper Sara B. on February 22, 2004 at 12:42 PM.]

2/16/047:51 PM

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corproliteMember

After reading through all of this discussion, a thought came to mind. Why not provide a feature that allows a sniper to disable the automatic adjustment for their snipe. They can either allow AS to adjust the snipe or force it to carry out based on their time requirement. That way they can loose the snipe and not blame AS for it. I know it probably won't happen, but then people who are dissatisfied with the lead time wouldn't have a reason to complain.

2/21/049:05 PM

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shirleyMember

If an option like this were ever to be offered, I think it should DEFINITELY be inside some sort of "Advanced" option full of disclaimers. Personally, I prefer to let AS measure the lag times and adjust as needed, but based on the number of complaints I've seen here lately, I'd say Educate the complainers and then let them take their chances.

On the other hand, Sara, is there any way you can answer future complaints on this topic by simply saying something like "at 12:15:15 on 2/20/04 we were measuring an average 25 second delay, so your snipe was adjusted 30 seconds to compensate" and leaving it at that?

I know these complaints must be incredibly frustrating for you. AS is doing it's best to use the info it has to make sure it's customers get what they want -- a win -- and in this case it seems you can't keep people happy. If you adjust the times they complain because the lead was too long, and someone "got a bid in after mine" and either outbid them or raised their winning bid. If you DON'T adjust the time, they complain that AS didn't bid for them in time... And of course, they never even NOTICE when AS makes an adjustment that gets eaten up by the lag.

But maybe a simple, objective, fact-based answer will shut them up, where an arguement that basically just says "You're wrong, and you can't possibly out-snipe us" doesn't? When you argue without presenting evidence, it just sounds like you're saying "Nyah, nyah, nyah, I'm right and you're wrong and this is the way it is because I said so." Not exactly diplomatic, and not necessarily the best way to turn unhappy customers into happy ones...

Sorry to be critical, just trying to help with the Customer Service side. Feel free to delete this if you like.